[ifinnegan]

I guess this site publishes anything. As they note, the articles are not reviewed.

I’ve seen worse articles.

Still, this was ludicrous and non-rigorous.

The very short sequences that match very short HIV sequences also match 100’s of other sequences in all sorts of organisms.

[winoneforthegipper]

Thanks was hoping for that knowledge.

Interesting though that a few questions they raised appear to have some merit.

[edwinland]

Thanks for that info. Can you elaborate a bit more?

[ProtectOurFreedom]

Speed is clearly taking precedence over peer review. I'm not a microbiologist, but they did document their methods, logic, reasoning and sources well. They didn't look at "all sorts of organisms" -- they restricted their research to coronaviruses. I don't see any reason to slander this as "ludicrous and non-rigorous." Please elaborate if you have information to discredit this work. Can you explain why should this analysis be expanded beyond coronaviruses to "all sorts of organisms"?

We retrieved all the available coronavirus sequences (n=55) from NCBI viral genome database and we used the GISAID (Elbe & Buckland-Merrett, 2017) to retrieve all available full-length sequences (n=28) of 2019- nCoV as on 27 Jan 2020. Multiple sequence alignment of all coronavirus genomes was performed by using MUSCLE software (Edgar, 2004) based on neighbour joining method. Out of 55 coronavirus genome 32 representative genomes of all category were used for phylogenetic tree development using MEGAX software (Kumar et al., 2018).

On careful examination of the sequence alignment we found that the 2019- nCoV spike glycoprotein contains 4 insertions. We found that these 4 insertions are unique to 2019-nCoV and are not present in other coronaviruses analyzed. Another group from China had documented three insertions comparing fewer spike glycoprotein sequences of coronaviruses . Another group from China had documented three insertions comparing fewer spike glycoprotein sequences of coronaviruses.

So two other research groups in China documented three novel insertions.

[reardensteel]

Thanks for clarifying. This thread was terrifying until your post.

[Black Agnes]

Have you seen the model of this spike protein vs. the ace2 receptor?

It’s like it was designed to fit exactly there. Much deeper, much less side chain disruption. Much better surface/surface interaction vs the spike protein of another coronavirus.

And the odds that it mutated, 4 times, and each time added (even a small) sequence that’s a homolog to another protein are astronomical.