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1. 2020-06-11 14:38 Robert F. Garry open
   "animal HKU1 comes from" Rodents maybe - probably
2. 2020-06-11 14:44 Edward C. Holmes open
   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.
3. 2020-06-11 15:02 Robert F. Garry open
   "Then why would publish the sequence of a related bat virus that puts you in frame?" To throw off M15 and Pompeo?
4. 2020-06-11 15:13 Kristian G. Andersen open
   People have put furin sites into CoVs previously - here's one example from SARS: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7111780/
5. 2020-06-11 15:13 Kristian G. Andersen
   There's a paper where they put it into a bat virus and shows it has much broader host range - I believe from Baric's group. I'll find it.
6. 2020-06-11 15:15 Edward C. Holmes open
   At S1/S2?
7. 2020-06-11 15:15 Kristian G. Andersen open
   Yup - the paper above is _exactly_ where it was inserted in SARS2 - that's the part I missed previously (I have been aware of these papers all the time).
8. 2020-06-11 15:16 Kristian G. Andersen open
   (BUT, the inserted site _is not_ the same as in the paper - that would have been a dead giveaway)
9. 2020-06-11 15:16 Edward C. Holmes open
   We're going round in circles...that's the Follis paper...the first paper we discussed and I sent you in early Feb.

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