Reading Room Production — page 92

Clare Clare Thomas Senior Editor Nature From: GiEsN Bown.iov.cn> Sent: 29 June 2021 00:13 To: Clare Thomas onature.com> Subject: Re: RE: RE: A question about the addendum to your Nature paper Dear Clare, Thank you for your information. I'm fine with the passing to the journalist on the information I told you. Best regards, Zhengli, nooo JAAD E--- AEA: "Clare Thomas" im puecom> BIKA [A] :202 1-06-29 04:39:21 ital wh.iov.cn" a iov.cn> S RE: RE: A question about the addendum to your Nature paper Dear Zhengli, Thanks again for replying to my question about the discrepancy highlighted to us. We've received some queries about it from journalists. Conversations between editors and authors are confidential but I wanted to ask you if you would have any objection to our passing on the information that you have told us? Would you be willing for us to tell the journalists that you have told us that the bioinformatics approaches used to analyse the genome sequences in the Nature paper and the thesis were different? We are considering how to respond and wonder whether this might help dampen the speculation. Please could you let me know? All the best, Clare From: gQwh.iov.cn Bown iov.cn> Sent: 27 June 2021 To: Clare Thomas nature.com> Subject: Re: RE: A question about the addendum to your Nature paper Dear Clare, I'm sorry for replying you late. This kind of speculation by the anonymous person is damging the science. I thought it's not necessary to clarify the question when I received your email. But I did carefully check with my colleagues who did the sequence analyses. First, there is no doubt that the TG13 and 4991 are the same sample and also the only one we found in the past 17 years and show the closest relative to SARS-CoV-2. Second, the resason of the discrepancy come from different comparison strategy with different softwares. The data we published in Nature was produced by blastp in NCBI between TG13 and SARS-CoV Tor. The data in the thesis of our graduate student as indicated in the request email was produced by alignment of mutiple sequences using Mafft software followed by cauculation of identity by Bioedit.