I'm sure this is unrelated but I guess China built their first BSL4 lab a year
ago...in Whuan.
On Mon, 3 Feb 2020, Jake wrote:
> We then translated the aligned genome and found that these inserts are
> present
> in all Wuhan 2019-nCoV viruses except the 2019-nCoV virus of Bat as a host
> [Fig.S4]. Intrigued by the 4 highly conserved inserts unique to 2019-nCoV we
> wanted to understand their origin. For this purpose, we used the 2019-nCoV
> local alignment with each insert as query against all virus genomes and
> considered hits with 100% sequence coverage.
>
> Surprisingly, each of the four inserts aligned with short segments of the
> Human
> Immunodeficiency Virus-1 (HIV-1) proteins. The amino acid positions of the
> inserts in 2019-nCoV and the corresponding residues in HIV-1 gp120 and HIV-1
> Gag are shown in Table 1. The first 3 inserts (insert 1,2 and 3) aligned to
> short segments of amino acid residues in HIV-1 gp120. The insert 4 aligned to
> HIV-1 Gag. The insert 1 (6 amino acid residues) and insert 2 (6 amino acid
> residues) in the spike glycoprotein of 2019-nCoV are 100% identical to the
> residues mapped to HIV-1 gp120. The insert 3 (12 amino acid residues) in
> 2019-
> nCoV maps to HIV-1 gp120 with gaps [see Table 1]. The insert 4 (8 amino acid
> residues) maps to HIV-1 Gag with gaps.
>
> Although, the 4 inserts represent discontiguous short stretches of amino
> acids
> in spike glycoprotein of 2019-nCoV, the fact that all three of them share
> amino
> acid identity or similarity with HIV-1 gp120 and HIV-1 Gag (among all
> annotated
> virus proteins) suggests that this is not a random fortuitous finding. In
> other
> words, one may sporadically expect a fortuitous match for a stretch of 6-12
> contiguous amino acid residues in an unrelated protein. However, it is
> unlikely that all 4 inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike glycoprotein fortuitously
> match with 2 key structural proteins of an unrelated virus (HIV-1).
>
>
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