A single line often inverts meaning once you see what it
answers, so neighbouring messages are always shown.
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"exactly where they inserted it experimentally in SARS" Sure - but that site with the single R is a required cleavage site - if you're going to convert to a furin site then adding RRA at that exact position is the only thing that makes sense - or even RRAR to make it a super-optimal site like Nunberg did - what would not make sense is to stick aproline in and then to do the whole insertion out-of-frame.
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Yeah, agreed - however, this exact site already exist in other CoVs (just not in exactly this site) - not in HKU1 as Isaid, but in that Feline CoV. The part I'm really struggling with is that at the end of the day, we really don't have any hard evidence one way orthe other - and especially given some of the recent evidence, we also can't rule out that somebody actually put it inthere. That's obviously not to say that somebody _*did*_, but we can't rule it out. Our paper was pretty strong insaying "there's no way", but I have less confidence in that statement at this stage.
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What smoking guns Kristian? I don't quite see it. What recent evidence are you talking about? That Follis paper was literally the first one I looked at. Doesn't it's presence in HKU1 suggest that these events in nature a lot? Do we know what animal HKU1 comes from? I was reading Mike's paper to suggest that D614G was under selection to increase the infectivity of SARS-CoV-2, because it was directly related to the furin cleavage insertion, such that it not perfectly adapted to humans on emergence.
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What about Bill Gallaher's evidence?
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2020-06-11 14:34
Robert F. Garry
HKU1 actually does have an optimal furin site - some strains have a insert or deletion of SSS - yes some of these Shave predicted O-glycans [shared file(s): HKU-1 Spike.pdf]
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"animal HKU1 comes from" Rodents maybe - probably
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May be. Perhaps rodents are involved in SARS-CoV-2? I'm really struggling to understand why someone would "put" a furin site into a random bat virus they had not previously sequenced and published. Has the Baric group ever done such an experiment? Accidental lab escape is one thing, but why would deliberately do this to a bat virus? Then why would publish the sequence of a related bat virus that puts you in frame? There was no need to that if you were guilty.
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"Then why would publish the sequence of a related bat virus that puts you in frame?" To throw off M15 and Pompeo?
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People have put furin sites into CoVs previously - here's one example from SARS: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7111780/