3 Feb
2020
3 Feb
'20
8:37 p.m.
Possible, I guess? But extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.
Glancing at the figures, I see a handful of amino acids that coincide. I'm
not enough of a virologist to know how likely that is to happen by chance
(or convergent evolution). I'll wait until I see something at least
peer-reviewed.
Nick
On Mon, Feb 3, 2020 at 9:12 PM Jake <jake(a)spaz.org> wrote:
I'm sure this is unrelated but I guess China built
their first BSL4 lab a
year
ago...in Whuan.
http://english.www.gov.cn/state_council/ministries/2018/01/04/content_28147…
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).
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871v1.full.pdf
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