[type_enthusiast]

That is a super interesting article, thank you for posting it!

But, I guess my question is more about why the abstraction of "protein chunks" doesn't fall apart when there are relatively significant "diffs" in the RNA sequence.

[flobosg]

The most significant diffs between both vaccines occur in the untranslated regions located around the protein coding sequence and will never be present in the actual spike protein.

Regarding the protein coding region, because of the degeneracy/redundancy of the genetic code, all changes within it are synonymous and code for identical amino acids.