Noebels wonders if the gene mutations might make it easier for spreading depolarization to take hold.
At issue are studies to find out which mutations might make dangerous viruses like the H5N1 avian influenza strain more easily transmissible between humans.
If it's not, Fouchier says that he's interested in finding out which mutations might make it easily transmissible between ferrets, the kind of experiments that raised a huge controversy when his lab reported them in H5N1.
However, greater flexibility of L2 in the complex, permitted by the mutation, might make this change rather neutral resulting in only a small change of affinity, as is observed.
Last year two groups of scientists, one led by Dr Fouchier, described specific mutations that might make H5N1 transmissible from human to human.
In 2011 studies of mutations that might make H5N1 more contagious inspired global controversy critics feared the papers would provide a cookbook for a biological attack.
They cloned a gene, bre-5, and confirmed that blocking its activity, as a mutation might do, makes the worm resistant to two Bt toxins.
It should be noted that in the majority of reported cases of malignancy, a molecular diagnosis of a STAT3 mutation was not made and other genetic mutations might have been responsible for the syndrome [ 31].
Without this, any mutations that we might make are potentially difficult to interpret, since we will not know how these mutations affect the properties of the myosin.
In 1994, UCLA scientist Jared Diamond promoted a similar but more simplistic version of this theory, writing that the operant mutations might have been positively selected "in Jews for the intelligence putatively required to survive recurrent persecution, and also to make a living by commerce, because Jews were barred from the agricultural jobs available to the non-Jewish people".
These are particularly difficult to make because stable transgenic or genomically edited genotypes, even when heterozygous, could prove lethal, so conditional mutations might have to be engineered.
