Slack / Private Message Drop — page 70

May be. Perhaps rodents are involved in SARS-CoV-2? I'm really struggling to understand why someone would "put" a furin site into a random bat virus they had not previously sequenced and published. Has the Baric group ever done such an experiment? Accidental lab escape is one thing, but why would deliberately do this to a bat virus? Then why would publish the sequence of a related bat virus that puts you in frame? There was no need to that if you were guilty. [2020-06-11 15:02:34] [Robert Garry] "Then why would publish the sequence of a related bat virus that puts you in frame?" To throw off M15 and Pompeo? [2020-06-11 15:13:08] [Kristian Andersen] People have put furin sites into CoVs previously - here's one example from SARS: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7111780/ [2020-06-11 15:13:50] [Kristian Andersen] There's a paper where they put it into a bat virus and shows it has much broader host range - I believe from Baric's group. I'll find it. [2020-06-11 15:15:01] [Eddie Holmes] At S1/S2? [2020-06-11 15:15:46] [Kristian Andersen] Yup - the paper above is _exactly_ where it was inserted in SARS2 - that's the part I missed previously (I have been aware of these papers all the time). [2020-06-11 15:16:22] [Kristian Andersen] (BUT, the inserted site _is not_ the same as in the paper - that would have been a dead giveaway) [2020-06-11 15:16:32] [Eddie Holmes] We're going round in circles...that's the Follis paper...the first paper we discussed and I sent you in early Feb. [2020-06-11 15:18:29] [Eddie Holmes] My take is that furin cleavage sites are *everywhere* in natural viruses e.g. MERS. I'm revising a paper on avian avulaviruses and they have one. To me, there is a strong natural prior. [2020-06-11 15:18:52] [Kristian Andersen] Yes - I have been aware of the Follis paper all along - I was _not_ aware that their insertion was exactly where it is in SARS2 [2020-06-11 15:20:07] [Eddie Holmes] Also, the Zhou et al. paper never call it a furin cleavage site insertion and I think the alignment in that paper is the optimal one. If so, it is not a simple 'shift' but rather a complex set of indel events. [2020-06-11 15:20:46] [Kristian Andersen]