Reading Room Production — page 290

Now I have two more concerns regarding the manuscript: 1) In lines 48-49 in the PDF, you mentioned that "this emerging human virus is closely related to SARS-CoV, and also appears to have originated in horseshoe bats -- with its full genome 96% similar to a virus we discovered in Rhinolophus affinis". Here this virus refers to RaTG13. Could you please delete the word "we" in this sentence? Otherwise, some readers may think that RaTG13 was detected in our joint study (e.x.PREDICT) and we shared the sequence with EHA earlier. This may be used by some conspiracy theorists to make rumors. Actually, the sequence of RaTG13 was not included in the dataset I provided to you. It was not deposited into Genbank until this January. So I think it was not included in your dataset, and you used this sequence during the revision phase after COVID-19 outbreak. Though not labeled clearly, RaTG13 is also shown in the phylogenetic tree in Figure 3 (the one most closely related to 2019-nCoV from Rhinolophus affinis in Yunnan). So could you please revise the figure legend of figure 3 as: Maximum clade credibility tree including 201 RdRp sequences from theSarbecovirus lineage isolated in bats, including RaTG13 (Genbank accession numbers: MN996532) and two sequences of 2019-nCoV isolated in humans (GenBank accession numbers:MN908947 and MN975262). This will mean that in your analysis you downloaded the sequence from public database, but it was not included in the original dataset of bat CoVs that I provided to you. 2) In lines 89-91 in the PDF. It says "Our geographic datasets included 694 a-CoV sequences from six zoogeographic regions (22 provinces) and 519 B-CoV sequences from five zoogeographic regions (21 provinces) . The dataset contains some sequences detected from bats in Laos. Are the lao bat CoV sequences also counted in the 694 and 519 sequences? They are not from any Chinese province. If so,the numbers here needs to be corrected. Besides, CAS now requires authors from CAS institutes to deposit coronavirus sequences not only in Genbank but also in the public database of China National Center for Bioinformation when we publish our researches. So I will submit the sequences which I submited to Genbank last year to the Chinese database next week. If you have any questions please let me know. Best Ben AAA :"Alice Latinne" ecohealthalliance.org> FETE [A] :2020-04-04 22:26:44 (BHAA) WE A: "ARE" wh.iov.cn> PbiK: "Hongying Li" ecohealthalliance.org> =F gil: Re: Re: China Maps used in the manuscript Hi Ben, The supplementary material including Table S1 is attached. And yes it includes all the GenBank numbers you gave me (for the sequences you deposited in genbank by yourself) and all sequences already in GenBank from other studies. Please note that at this stage, I won't be able to modify the dataset, the analysis or the figures. Cheers, Alice On Wed, Apr 1, 2020 at 8:07 PM #Age own iov.cn> wrote: