3 ms·
Did you notice the bit where it's a cDNA clone of an RNA virus and do you understand the implications of that? This is an engineering product. As for politics
by xyzzy123 4y ago
Did you notice the bit where it's a cDNA clone of an RNA virus and do you understand the implications of that?
This is an engineering product.
As for politics, sure there is a lot of that going around but you can verify this finding yourself with freely available software using the published sequences.
- lamontcg 4y agoThat preprint is now starting to get slaughtered in the Disqus comment section associated with it.
- xyzzy123 4y agoI don't think much of the "takedown" so far. Interested to discuss specifics if I'm not getting something. Cadhla (who works for EcoHealth alliance BTW) points out that it was Wuhan University who registered the rice sequence bioproject PRJNA601977 - which is not hugely relevant since the source of the contamination could be from anywhere (that happened to have a HKU4 reverse genetics system...). Andreas points to incomplete sequence coverage (not unusual in a contamination scenario) and claims it might be "not dangerous work" because the sequence gap leaves open the possibility that the missing bit was non-functional. True but weak. It's 33 NTs of highly conserved sequence, what does he really think was in that gap? I know what Fat Tony would say. Flo's comments seem to be claiming that https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v2 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v2 is plagiarizing https://europepmc.org/article/ppr/ppr353109 https://europepmc.org/article/ppr/ppr353109 (the team's earlier paper which included a similar finding). Her claim that a reverse genetics systems for HKU4-like COVs was previously disclosed seems weird since AFAIK it was this team that had previously disclosed it. It's possible I am not understanding what she is saying as it makes no sense to me.