US intelligence and national security officials say the United States government is looking into the possibility that the novel coronavirus originated in a Chinese laboratory rather than a market, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter who caution it is premature to draw any...
www.cnn.com
goddamn even cnn is talking about this. sorry if it's been posted already, but I immediately thought of you nerds when I saw this. idk if it really means much for now, but I guess at least this gives us some vindication for going sperg on BLAST analyses a couple months ago when china was acting sketchy as fuck over giving people access to investigation lmao. it could also mean that they've found something interesting, even if it's not provable yet. idk, but it gives me some renewed interest.
though even if they can somehow pinpoint someone at the lab as being patient zero or something (not really sure how they're "taking a hard look at it"), i think it might not actually be possible to prove whether or not it's artificial. it seems like the virus has some evidence of a genetic recombination event, but given how bats frequently carry multiple viruses at the same time, and given that the exchanged bits both occur in bat viruses, such a thing could occur naturally. iirc the bit that appears inserted seemed convenient, but I guess that's how natural selection works.
if we wanted to bring that analysis back, maybe restriction enzymes with similar size and recognition sequence could at least give a hint of putative mechanism? or if it's crispr maybe off-target effects could be identified genome-wide or something? idk i'm more specialized on the computation end, we need to bring that otterly fellow back in here lmao.
If what you want is the god damned sequence, ISCIII got it in full. If you want the spike proteins it uses we also got it. Indeed it seems they analized the fucking thing left and right as much as could be expected. Here's some links:
This page contains links to bioinformatics resources useful to track the evolution and progression of the SARS-CoV-2 virus as well as to manage genomics data of the virus. Portals with COVID-19 genomics and epidemiologics information NEXTSTRAIN Nextstrain is an open-source project to harness the...
www.clinbioinfosspa.es
Documentation for analyzing SARS-Cov2 samples. Contribute to BU-ISCIII/SARS-Cov2_analysis development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
Overall, first of my declaration of bias. From the beginig I said this was likely originated from the BSL4 but not artificial. I still believe so. We know the BSL4 was researching coronaviri, we know it uses bats as research subjects and we know their higiene is fucking abhorrent, so I think that seals the deal for me. As for wether or not it's artificial... Let me actually go through in a bit more detail.
ISCIII sequenced 140 viral samples from all over the fucking planet. Result most obvious is this virus is actually EXTREMELY STABLE FOR ITS KIND. They were identical in well past 99.9% of its genome. Which means that the mutations are really fucking small. This has 2 conclusions.
1-It's not nearly as quick to mutate as the flu, meaning we're probably not gonna have too many new waves if we bomb china before they eat another fucking bat.
2-This was not artificially created by ways that make the genome less stable.
Point 2 is important because most ways of artificially creating a virus make it less stable. So that means either the chinks were ultralucky with the random methods (unlikely) or they were testing a natural viri. As for the non-random methods: could the chinks have inserted a fragment of DNA by recombination?
Well, the stability doesn't necessarily answer that one, for one reason, the virus is a bacteriophage, meaning it infects bacteria. And sadly bacteriophages can add to their genome part of a bacteria's genome without necessarily weakening their own genome's structure. This however tends to only happen on virus with high rate of mutation (everything that changes the dna, be it recombination or mutation happens when it's thermodynamically weak, if the DNA has a strong structure it just stays bound to itself and nothing can fuck with it. Statistically speaking of course DNA always mutates sooner or later) point is, while that is a plausible entry, it only means we should check further.
And have we found any bacterial DNA? no. This virus is a coronavirus through and through, it's SARS-2 beer boogaloo. The mutations it sports are really fucking small and we see no clearcut genes that would indicate artificial insertion, like any selector gene. See, when I add a gene to a virus, I tend to like being able to identify which samples have it. For these we use resistance genes or markers like that. This got none of that, so if it was artificial they added very little DNA without any marker. I'm not gonna say the chinks didn't do that, but I will say no sane researcher would do something that fucking retarded. Sadly that doesn't discard china.
Overall though. Our only possible hypotheses for artificial virus are:
-They used bacterial insertion to add miniscule mutations perfectly capable of appearing randomly without any marker.
-They used random methods and got so lucky that not only did this not weaken the genetic structure but the mutations wound up making it more stable than normal, while also not being nearly as many as we would expect from the more agressive method.
I'd say this is a normal, natural virus. It's proteins are the usual coronavirus shit, it's DNA has no trace of weird lab shit, Corona-chan ain't got no silicone that bossom is all natural, baby. My proposed origin is SARS, an already horrifying virus, was left to fester in bats until her less potent but way more virulent little sister came crawling out of the bats then some fucking idiot managed to get infected playing with bats.
