Reading Room Production — page 84

we do have an obligation to look into any queries that we receive about any Nature paper that we publish. I can imagine that you must be quite frustrated with these sorts of queries, but if there is an explanation for the apparent discrepancy highlighted to us then it would be great if you could please let us know. Many thanks in advance and all the best, Clare From: Clare Thomas Sent:.23 June 2021 17:07 To: wh.iov.cn' wh.iov.cn> Subject: A question about the addendum to your Nature paper Dear Zhengli, I hope you're well. We have been contacted by someone who claims that a thesis from the Wuhan Institute of Virology contains information that seemingly questions the relationship of RaTG13 to the sample originally named 4991. You can see the correspondence that we've received below. We have not clicked on these links, so have not looked at the thesis itself, but would you please be able to provide some clarification about these claims? I believe the concern is that if Ra4991 and RaTG13 are the same virus, as claimed in the addendum, then their identity to SARS-CoV should be the same and the table pasted below indicates that they differ to some extent in the spike gene. Thanks in advance and best wishes, Clare Clare Thomas Senior Editor Nature A Dissertation submitted to The University of Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2019 by Yu Ping at the Wuhan institute of Virology has recently surfaced online. Original: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1cJBYAkjkZX9KbNfHCaeaaMhNDoffielg English translation: https://docs.google.com/document/d/15U2uE7Eru0QxRbf8QVRPRMpssCoYhGvT/edit The document has been uploaded by an anonymous user on Twitter, and contains potentially new information the RATG13 virus sequence and its relationship to bat sample 4991. The RATG13 sequence was first mentioned in the article 'A pneumonia outbreak associated with a new coronavirus of probable bat origin» published by Nature. In the addendum to this article, that was published November last year, the authors clarify that RATG13 sequence is the full virus sequence collected from bat sample 4991.