Slack / Private Message Drop — page 682

[2021-04-06 04:15:35] [Robert Garry] Miles and Steve likely know a few too. Not a coincidence they push lab leak. [2021-04-06 11:23:36] [Robert Garry] The DRASTIC boys think they found a pony. This smells like total Focanuba or perhaps even a bit of Alcanopa. Not my game, but my guess: Spillover level contamination. IF only they had found Bas-Congo virus. Unexpected novel Merbecovirus discoveries in agricultural sequencing datasets from Wuhan, China Daoyu Zhang 1 , Adrian Jones 2 , Yuri Deigin 3* , Karl Sirotkin4 , Alejandro Sousa5,6 , Kevin McCairn7 [shared file(s): Flavikins - cotton seqs.pdf] [2021-04-06 13:37:21] [Eddie Holmes] Did they check for rodent reads? Tells me that there a lot of CoVs out there! Also, none of these are human pathogens and Fujian is not in Wuhan. [2021-04-06 14:00:49] [Eddie Holmes] Someone will need to do a proper analysis of all these data sets to see what likely hosts are present. Obviously none of this is infectious. [2021-04-06 14:04:41] [Robert Garry] Not ponys, but rats, mice etc. Not surprising to find rodents and other animals in fields. If they would have done the study on a field in Sierra Leone they likely would have found Lassa virus. [2021-04-06 14:06:18] [Eddie Holmes] Exactly [2021-04-06 15:18:45] [Robert Garry] @Kristian Andersen maybe we should send the rodent team to China - they might trap some interesting coronavirus containing rodents in those fields. After they trap West African pangolins for me of course. [2021-04-06 15:59:10] [Eddie Holmes] Ape boy has just started following me on ResearchGate. I never use it, but I wonder if there is a way to block people? Alternatively, posting a fake project might be fun... [2021-04-06 16:07:26] [Eddie Holmes] In other news, has anyone heard of a 48 nt deletion in the 3'UTR of B.1.1.7? [2021-04-06 16:08:27] [Andrew Rambaut] We generally ignore the UTRs because they are often badly done [2021-04-06 16:09:52] [Andrew Rambaut] Where are these B.1.1.7s? [2021-04-06 16:10:03] [Eddie Holmes] New Jersey