[sudo-discuss] 2019-nCoV is a synthetic hybrid of SARS and AIDS

[Eric O'Connor]

Anecdotally: I showed the sequences in this paper to my partner — a PhD virologist who is currently (like literally right now, up till 1-2am every night the last few weeks) working on a coronavirus drug trial, and she rolled her eyes *pretty* hard. 

Debunked, I’d say.

~ Eric (not a virologist, just into virologists)

On Mon, Feb 3, 2020, at 20:37, Nick Mapsy wrote:
> 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 at 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_281476001535134.htm?fbclid=IwAR3zi1K6nUpgiMvePhmDNatta66nt2QJSXg6KZUlUyOLZSC_pLA2j35JLtE
>> 
>> 
>>  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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