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Slack / Private Message Drop, pp.242-243 [SLACK_000456] · slack_pm:msg:02526

Date: 2020-10-30 15:54
Type: chat message · slack
recipient: Robert F. Garry, Edward C. Holmes, Andrew Rambaut
speaker: Kristian G. Andersen

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If you had some suspected cases of novel coronavirus, Weijun would be the kind of guy you'd contact - he's been developing diagnostics for SARS too, so would make sense. I think there's probably an earlier timeline here that they may have been obscuring a little - which, honestly, wouldn't surprise me that much.

In context

A single line often inverts meaning once you see what it answers, so neighbouring messages are always shown.

2020-10-30 15:33 Kristian G. Andersen open

One explanation is that BGI created these four BioSamples for a different purpose and then backfilled with the SARS2 data when they generated it. But I don't think there's any ambiguity that these were created on 12/10 - onlywe don't know for what purpose (so could have been for a novel coronavirus, could have been for something else -the metadata describing the BioSample very likely weren't entered until the data were deposited).
2020-10-30 15:35 Kristian G. Andersen open

I would love to see the full submission history for these entries - Andrew, dig a little :wink:
2020-10-30 15:51 Kristian G. Andersen open

Eddie, it's your paper... :wink: https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(20)30251-8/fulltext I assume this is the same Weijun Chen who's the submitter of the data and is from BGI.
2020-10-30 15:52 Kristian G. Andersen open

He'd know what's up with that early creation date.
2020-10-30 15:54 Kristian G. Andersen

If you had some suspected cases of novel coronavirus, Weijun would be the kind of guy you'd contact - he's been developing diagnostics for SARS too, so would make sense. I think there's probably an earlier timeline here that they may have been obscuring a little - which, honestly, wouldn't surprise me that much.
2020-10-30 16:22 Edward C. Holmes open

Yes, I looked at the Lancet paper straight away. I've already contacted Weifeng. If that fails I'll contact Weijun Chen.
2020-10-30 16:25 Edward C. Holmes open

The point is who is the 'you' in your question? Who did they work for? A doctor in Wuhan? What people would do isrun the standard panel of tests and if they failed perhaps contact a sequencing company like BGI. But if that were the case why did they not submit samples until 2 weeks later? My guess is that they were created for something else and then backfilled.
2020-10-30 16:25 Kristian G. Andersen open

Yeah, it'll be interesting to see what they say - also, this is from the paper about the metadata [shared file(s): Screen Shot 2020-10-30 at 4.08.13 PM.png]
2020-10-30 16:26 Kristian G. Andersen open

"My guess is that they were created for something else and then backfilled" Yeah, that's my suspicion too - although that _is_ a little unsual.

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