Kristian G. AndersenGeverifieerd account

Wiley have a lot to answer for. They publish the paper AND write an editorial on it AND put out a press release entitled “Researchers Trace Coronavirus Outbreak in China to Snakes”.

Is there any doubt the analyses are flawed and the conclusions erroneous?

None on the basis of the data provided.

It begs the question of whether the reviewers of this manuscript had the relevant expertise in molecular evolutionary analysis.

And why the journal pushed it through so quickly, wrote an editorial on it and hawked it to the world’s press.

I have done these types of analyses - looking at how well codon usages of viruses match those of (known) hosts to train a model to predict putative hosts for novel pathogens. Good idea, but it can’t be done - rarely is the top match a know host and there is no meaningful signal!

Out of curiosity - given that ML-based projects on this especially aren't likely to slow down in the next 10 years, what do you think good work on this would look like? (I realize this might be a conversation for over beers instead of twitter)

Oh yes, AI to the rescue . Issue one - small training dataset and that's hard to overcome. But otherwise, integration of other data - trees, kmer profiling, restriction sites, host gene interactions, structures, known receptors, etc.