3 ms·

This closely mirrors my probabilities; https://medium.com/advances-in-biological-science/explained-the-hard-evidence-why-the-sars-cov-2-genome-was-not-engineer

This closely mirrors my probabilities; https://medium.com/advances-in-biological-science/explained-the-hard-evidence-why-the-sars-cov-2-genome-was-not-engineered-and-unlikely-leaked-f3d6fbb10ff9 https://medium.com/advances-in-biological-science/explained-... It's extremely unlikely that the jump was from bats -> humans just based on how 'optimized' the ACE2 binding and furin cleavage sites are. It's theoretically possible that it happened at some time in the past, and then serial passage in humans led to the more 'optimized' virus but that seems pretty unlikely too.

tripletao 5y ago
Are you aware of BANAL-20-52's spike? That's a bat virus, and it's only 16 AA substitutions (plus no FCS) away from SARS-CoV-2: https://twitter.com/jbloom_lab/status/1440309655087902720?lang=en https://twitter.com/jbloom_lab/status/1440309655087902720?la... I've seen no explanation for why the spike of a bat virus would be so well-adapted to human ACE2, but apparently that one is. That's an argument against the need for an intermediate host, whether that host is natural (e.g. a non-bat wild animal) or not (e.g. hACE2 mice in the lab).