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Slack / Private Message Drop, p.29 [SLACK_000243] · slack_pm:msg:00294

Date: 2020-05-18 16:51
Type: chat message · slack
mentioned: Edward C. Holmes
recipient: Robert F. Garry, Edward C. Holmes, Andrew Rambaut
speaker: Kristian G. Andersen

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@Eddie Holmes - your questions earlier last week, were they referring to this paper? https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.01.073262v1 I find it to be quite interesting and they pick up on some of the exact features of (lack of) selection that I reported back in February. Certainly peculiar - and I think lends _some_ evidence to the pre-circulation theory.

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preprint https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.01.073262v1

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2020-05-18 16:51 Kristian G. Andersen

@Eddie Holmes - your questions earlier last week, were they referring to this paper? https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.01.073262v1 I find it to be quite interesting and they pick up on some of the exact features of (lack of) selection that I reported back in February. Certainly peculiar - and I think lends _some_ evidence to the pre-circulation theory.
2020-05-18 16:53 Kristian G. Andersen open

Back in February I compared S and ORF1 - so just here for reference (very similar to what they observe) [shared file(s): Screen Shot 2020-05-18 at 4.52.06 PM.png]
2020-05-18 17:40 Edward C. Holmes open

No, they weren't. I asked some questions by my friends who drive cars with blacked out windows if you know what Imean. I saw that paper and of course reminded me of your earlier analysis. Not quite sure what to think: that paperis deliberately trying to be controversial by not excluding lab escape. But would lab culturing have produced a'perfectly' adapted human virus? I don't see way. Did the 2013-2016 EBOV require any human adaptation?
2020-05-18 17:42 Kristian G. Andersen open

"lab culturing have produced a 'perfectly' adapted human virus" - I'm not quite sure. I would think not (outside the spike), but it depends on what drives the selection and that is unclear to me.We both have papers on Ebola human adaptation, so I'd say yes :wink:
2020-05-18 17:46 Kristian G. Andersen open

When it comes to the selection argument, what is still most telling to be is the RBD. SARS changed the contact residues a lot getting into humans, so a lot of the signal might have been driven by that. SARS-CoV-2 is already'perfect' for binding, so it doesn't need to - BUT that 'perfect' RBD is found in a pangolin CoV, so clearly it already exists in nature - no further adaptation needed it seems.

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