zlacker

>>codech+(OP)
> Wade devoted a full section to the “furin cleavage site,” a distinctive segment of SARS-CoV-2’s genetic code that makes the virus more infectious by allowing it to efficiently enter human cells.

> Within the scientific community, one thing leapt off the page. Wade quoted one of the world’s most famous microbiologists, Dr. David Baltimore, saying that he believed the furin cleavage site “was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus.” Baltimore, a Nobel Laureate and pioneer in molecular biology, was about as far from Steve Bannon and the conspiracy theorists as it was possible to get. His judgment, that the furin cleavage site raised the prospect of gene manipulation, had to be taken seriously.

Furin cleavage sites have evolved and are present in multiple coronaviruses:

- HCoV-OC43 (infects humans)

- HCoV-HKU1 (infects humans)

- MHV-A59

- ChRCoV-HKU24

- BtCoV-ENT

- BtNeCoV-PML-PHE1

- BtCoV-HKU4

- BtCoV-HKU5

- MERS-CoV

- BtHpCoV-Zhejiang2013

- SARS-CoV-2

Phylogenetic analysis suggests that it has evolved independently at least 6 times that we know of.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187350612...

After that article was published a team in Thailand found furin cleavage sites in sarbecoviruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2 called RacCS203 (91.5% similarity to SARS-CoV-2) and RmYN02 (93.3% similarity to SARS-CoV-2)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7873279/

Furin cleavage sites are common, nature understands how to utilize that trick very well, and continuously has re-discovered it.

>>lamont+2h
There are so many "shocking" articles, but here's something I don't get:

The closest genetic match is only 3.8% similar. When it only has 29,903 base pairs, that's 1,136 mutations. I'm no bioscientist but my friends who are tell me that's a lot of changes, and that experiments might change a few base pairs or proteins at a time. A lab leak theory doesn't explain how gain of function study resulted in so many mutations, unless they were blasting these viruses with radiation, and what would be the point of that? Radiation mutations would cause too many changes to do useful science.

Everyone keeps looking at bats but the closest bat coronavorus is 20 years of evolution away. SARS and MERS came from palm covets and dromedary camels respectively, so what's the deal?

Every time I read about this I keep thinking "huh that's sketchy but circumstantial" and I've yet to find an answer to how the lab would've gotten to this point, undiscovered, with no published papers or research or notes or preprints anywhere

>>Jarwai+mq
There's around one mutation each time it transmits between hosts (for flu it is one each time it goes cell to cell). 1,136 doesn't seem that high, say it hops 100 bats a year, that's just a divergence of 11 years of bat hopping (the more mutations that add up maybe the rate doesn't hold due to conserved regions though?). 5X less hops a year, 55 years: still a blink.

>>cma+jC
Well yeah, but that's an argument towards it being spread from the wild/against it being a lab escape, right?