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03: To: Clare Thomas nature.com> Subject: Re: RE: A question about the addendum to your Nature paper [External - Use Caution] Dear Clare, I'm sorry for replying you late. This kind of speculation by the anonymous person is damging the science. I thought it's not necessary to clarify the question when I received your email. But I did carefully check with my colleagues who did the sequence analyses. First, there is no doubt that the TG13 and 4991 are the same sample and also the only one we found in the past 17 years and show the closest relative to SARS-CoV-2. Second, the resason of the discrepancy come from different comparison strategy with different softwares. The data we published in Nature was produced by blastp in NCBI between TG13 and SARS-CoV Tor. The data in the thesis of our graduate student as indicated in the request email was produced by alignment of mutiple sequences using Mafft software followed by cauculation of identity by Bioedit. In addition, the thesis of our graduate student is currently embargo becuase of knowledge property protection and we don't know why this thesis was uploded in the google drive and misused by the consparicy people. I hope I clarify your concern. Best regards, Zhengli, Bown. iov.cn