Slack / Private Message Drop — page 224

SLACK_000438 I'm looking at writing a story on how they've recently updated the RaTG13 genome in the NCBI gene bank: https//www.ncbi.nim.nih.gov/nuccore/MN996532 and Pete Doherty recommended you as a good person to contact about this. I saw some people claiming on Twitter that this is evidence that the virus was not naturally occurring and that it was manufactured in a lab. I don't know enough about reading genomes to parse this update, but I was wondering if you could have a look and let me know if there's any significance you can see (apparently there's been a couple of base pair changes). I don't expect you to read through the whole thing! I'd just like your take on anything that jumps out at you or if you have a possible explanation as to why the gene bank was updated. I think it would be good to address this by an expert before rumours start picking up. Thank you. Thomas Crow Science Writer_ witter LinkedIn [Eddie Holmes] I've no interest in the story, but I see they updated RaTG13 on GenBank. Anything significant? [Eddie Holmes] Bloody good timing. Not. [Eddie Holmes] Only appears to be a few base changes by the look of it. [Kristian Andersen] They're writing about an article about a sequence being updated on Genbank? Fuck me. There is NO significance to this and it's not worth commenting on - ANYBODY who does this type of work knows that sequences get updated every now and again, especially when the sequences are (a) important and (b) had a few low-coverage regions that might have had assembly errors. This changes nothing - and as you say, only a handful of completely insignificant changes. This is 100% business as usual - move on. [Kristian Andersen] FWIW, the new sequences 100% match the consensus sequence I generated and shared on Virological, which might have been a better assembly than their own. It's possible that they just downloaded my bam files (which I made available on Google Cloud) and then they called the consensus from those. Again, all totally standard. [Eddie Holmes] Yes, that's what I just told him. The tinfoil hats have got their diapers in a twist over it.