Glossary

131 abbreviations. Those marked harvested were extracted from the documents themselves, where a term is spelled out immediately before its abbreviation. Search expands these automatically in both directions.

Virus and strain names

Not abbreviations — bare identifiers the records never define. Read the note before treating one as a virus: the correspondence uses real isolates, mistranscriptions and jokes in the same register.

RaTG13 — bat SARS-related coronavirus, sampled from a Rhinolophus affinis bat at Tongguan town, Mojiang county, Yunnan, in 2013 (331 occurrences)

The closest known relative of SARS-CoV-2 in these records, and the reference point for most of the origins argument in them: "~96% identical overall to SARS-CoV-2, its spike diverges in the RBD" (Proximal Origin draft, fauci_intel p.45). The name follows the convention Holmes spells out in the chats — host species, then location, then sample year — so Ra = Rhinolophus affinis, TG = Tongguan, 13 = 2013; the 2015 sample from the same site is RaTG15, a different virus. Two traps in the text: the Baric interview transcribes it once as a bare "RaTG" (baric_ti p.136), corrected by the errata sheet at p.142 — "Strike 'RaTG' and insert 'RaTG13'" — and one Slack quotation of a conspiracy claim hyphenates it as "RaTG-13". Neither spelling is a distinct virus.

RaTG18 — not a virus — an in-joke about a flask in a press photograph (2 occurrences)

Both occurrences are the same 2020-10-26 exchange in the private Slack, after a newspaper profile photographed Edward Holmes in a lab: Andersen asks "does that flask say RaTG18?", and Holmes replies "I really should have written RaTG18 on one of those flasks. Damn. Next time." It is a joke at the expense of readers hunting for lab-leak evidence in photographs. No record in this corpus treats RaTG18 as an isolate, and it appears in no sequence, alignment or tree here.