Slack / Private Message Drop — page 150

something like that completely behind closed door just doesn't seem plausible. It's important to keep in mind that one of our arguments against animal culture just disappeared though. [2020-08-29 16:08:03] [Eddie Holmes] Well, we did say 'had not previously been described'. It has now. We were right at the time! [2020-08-29 16:08:31] [Eddie Holmes] Daszak would have known and you bet he's had his emails screened. [2020-08-29 16:09:05] [Kristian Andersen] Yeah, very true - actually, maybe we should file a FOIA... :wink: [2020-08-29 17:48:27] [Kristian Andersen] Okay, so just for the heck of it, I decided to look at some at Baric's mouse adaptation experiments with SARS-1. He grew SARS-1 repeatedly in mice (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19853271/) to gain "mouse adapted" variants. Imagine somebody had done the same for SARS-2 - we'd expect to see at least _some_ of these mutations fixed in SARS-2, right? There are 14 "mouse adapted" mutations in SARS-1. If I compare those to residues in SARS-2, 2/14 are the same between the mouse adapted version and SARS-2, _however_, in both those cases the residues are identical between SARS-2 and RaTG13, so it's the ancestral state. In other words, there's no evidence at all for mouse adaptation of SARS-2 - and in fact, seeing 0/14 'mouse residues' is pretty darn strong evidence against. And as a last check, I looked at whether any of these have reverted/mutated during the pandemic - nope. So we lose one argument, but gain a new one. That's a good day. [2020-08-29 17:52:11] [Kristian Andersen] And in case anybody wants to take a look at the alignment, here's the Geneious file - GOF (mouse adapted) variants in the "Sequence variant" track. [shared file(s): Mouse adaptation.geneious] [2020-08-29 23:57:50] [Eddie Holmes] Nice work. I was going to suggest posting something like this on Virological, but perhaps it better just to keep it in the back pocket for now? [2020-08-30 07:20:07] [Kristian Andersen] Yeah, I suggest we keep chipping away at it. I have gotten a lot of requests for Origins v2.0, so maybe we'd want to consider that in a couple of months... [2020-08-30 14:19:55] [Eddie Holmes] In reality, other than twiddling around the edges, there is nothing new much for Origins 2.0. No new viruses of note since March. Lots of theories, but nothing concrete. Definitely need to wait a bit. [2020-08-30 22:51:01] [Eddie Holmes] Had to write a reference for someone EgoHealth and I'm amused to see that they have a 'chief of staff': [2020-08-30 22:51:02]