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Not to be tinfoil hat but isn’t this exactly the sort of thing you would add to it if you were making a bioweapon in the only BSL-4 lab in China which is a few

Not to be tinfoil hat but isn’t this exactly the sort of thing you would add to it if you were making a bioweapon in the only BSL-4 lab in China which is a few meters from the wet market they are saying was the epicenter? > Strikingly, the 2019-nCoV S-protein sequence contains 12 additional nucleotides upstream of the single Arg↓ cleavage site 1 (Fig. 1, Fig. 2) leading to a predictively solvent-exposed PRRAR↓SV sequence, which corresponds to a canonical furin-like cleavage site (Braun and Sauter, 2019; Izaguirre, 2019; Seidah and Prat, 2012). This furin-like cleavage site, is supposed to be cleaved during virus egress (Mille and Whittaker, 2014) for S-protein “priming” and may provide a gain-of-function to the 2019-nCoV for efficient spreading in the human population compared to other lineage b betacoronaviruses. This possibly illustrates a convergent evolution pathway between unrelated CoVs.

vikramkr 7y ago
IF you were making a bioweapon, you'd probably try and do the opposite so you can try and target it better. This is a really dumb bioweapon because it infects you worse too - in general bioweapons are just a terrible weapon for non=suicidal nation-states because you can at least aim nuclear weapons, but you can't aim a virus. This mutation is exactly the sort of boring everyday mutation viruses pick up in the process of being viruses - they mutate quicker than our DNA and picking up something like this is with a dna replication error leading to a little stutter is not hard at all. HIV, influenza, etc are all examples of how effective good old fashioned natural selection and random mutation is at advancing viral capabilities and evasion strategies without any help from humans needed.