You can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history. Learn more
This paper has just been published on Biorxiv. I would be extremely interested in seeing comment from others working on 2019-nCoV sequencing, because its claims are. . .unusual, to say the least. But presented with data:https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871v1 …
Just checked their results. The similarity is spurious. Out of 4 inserts they identify between NCov and SARS, 2 are found in bat coronavirus. Of the remaining two, only one is most similar to HIV, and is so short (6 AA) that the similarity is not higher than chance given database
The other novel insert between the bat coronavirus glycoprotein and NCoV is more similar to 13 viruses besides HIV and none of those similarities is higher than chance (given insert size/viral protein database size)
The methods are not well described, there are many flaws here and there, i.e. 1) no genbank references for the HIV sequences they used, 2) the insertions regions are short and hypervariables region, 3) the tree is not rooted by the outgroup.
It seems they took only the short fragments to perform a blast and found these motif in HIV sequence. But no e-values are provided for the blast results.
Absolutely. Seems this is one of the few flaws of pre-print approach? Lacks the (flawed, often poorly applied) filter of peer review and people not in the field may not understand most of this appears to be bunk.
Didn’t researchers from Wuhan also publish the first example of bat coronavirus in 2015? Isn’t the gp120 and GAG insertion super sketchy? The linker domain is also sketchy. I will double check the domains to see which portion of HIV’s gp120/GAG domains this came from.
Thank you, all of you, for checking into this. @DrEricDing is retweeting this, and it's freaking people out that it's a bioweapon.
No one's talking about that this is a pre-print - just the sensationalism.
Thanks for the clarity.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.
