Unexpected novel Merbecovirus discoveries in agricultural sequencing datasets from Wuhan, China · HackerPapers discussions

Unexpected novel Merbecovirus discoveries in agricultural sequencing datasets from Wuhan, China — mentioned by tripletao

Thu, 10 Feb 2022 01:56:50 GMT

Very few research groups in any field have published everything they're working on. Sometimes that's a deliberate choice, to avoid enabling rivals; but even when you're trying to be as open as you can, it takes time to write stuff up. The WIV has claimed that they'd published sequences for all the viruses they were working with. But in the same way that the Hungarian team found SARS-CoV-2 contamination in Antarctic soil just now, a different team found a novel Merbecovirus in a rice dataset from a different group in Wuhan: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.01533 That Merbecovirus couldn't possibly…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Unexpected novel Merbecovirus discoveries in agricultural sequencing datasets from Wuhan, China — mentioned by tripletao

Fri, 28 May 2021 05:23:42 GMT

It seems like you have a lot more confidence than I do that we know everything the WIV was working on? I agree that SARS-CoV-2 is unlikely to be derived (naturally, artificially, or otherwise) from any known virus, including RaTG13; but a distinctive characteristic of the WIV's research was their sampling of novel viruses from remote bat caves that no other humans routinely entered. That presents a pathway for emergence of novel, naturally-evolved pathogens beyond what normal agricultural etc. activity already risked, whether through a researcher infected in the field or through a literal lab…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Unexpected novel Merbecovirus discoveries in agricultural sequencing datasets from Wuhan, China — mentioned by ricksunny

Sun, 11 Apr 2021 16:26:32 GMT

(reposting sans downmodded comment) Here is fresh evidence (< 1 wk ago) that labs in Wuhan have worked on unpublished coronaviruses: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.01533 The above findings are replicable by any bioinformatician operating on published sources. This preprint was reviewed by one of the authors of the Human Genome Project’s landmark 2001 paper having served as an HGP sequencing team leader at the Whitehead Institute: https://twitter.com/kevin_mckernan/status/137939900576396083... The findings critically undermine Western zoonotic scientists’ (Daszak of the WHO-convened study…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Unexpected novel Merbecovirus discoveries in agricultural sequencing datasets from Wuhan, China — mentioned by tripletao

Sat, 10 Apr 2021 19:24:16 GMT

> Tons of people know what they work on and what they have in their collection. If that's true, then why has the WIV removed public access from their database? It serves only to remove a valuable scientific resource, and to cast suspicion on China; so why would they do such a thing? Do you genuinely believe that even with the international importance of the topic, no one in China can figure out how to keep a simple database-backed website up? And again, Deigin et al. report assembly of the genome of a novel coronavirus from contamination in other published reads sequenced in the same…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Unexpected novel Merbecovirus discoveries in agricultural sequencing datasets from Wuhan, China — mentioned by tripletao

Sat, 10 Apr 2021 04:30:16 GMT

Deigin has said explicitly elsewhere that if SARS-CoV-2 arose from a lab accident, he believes it arose from manipulation of a novel, unpublished virus collected by the WIV from nature. This makes any arguments based on distance from existing, published viruses irrelevant. RaTG13 was such a virus (collected 2013, published post-pandemic), but it's very unlikely to be the ancestor for the reasons that you note. No one outside the WIV (and thus, no one beyond the physical control of the Chinese government) knows what other viruses they had in their freezer or database. Deigin has recently…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Unexpected novel Merbecovirus discoveries in agricultural sequencing datasets from Wuhan, China — HN submission

Tue, 06 Apr 2021 19:13:04 GMT

Unexpected novel Merbecovirus discoveries in agricultural sequencing datasets

1 point; 0 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.