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Hard to know since the authors havent provided the date of sequencing.

It very well could be a contamination from a lab that ablated FCS in order to make spike protein from the vector that they could test drugs against.

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What a fantastic article!

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This is fascinating. One of the links leads to this: “reported the discovery of SARS-CoV-2 sequences within a set of antarctic soil samples taken in a 3-week-period after 24-12-2018”. December 2018?

http://adeno-news.com/2022/08/09/unique-sars-cov-2-genomes-found-in-antarctic-samples-raises-questions-about-sars-cov-2-origin-lineages/

Does this point to existence of a SARS-CoV-2 in late 2018 or is there another reason why this date isn’t damning on its own?

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"The spike protein is 100% identical to the amino acid sequence of C19 spike minus the 4 critical A.As in the FCS. " so is this a sequence before the FCS was added, or did someone remove the FCS? And is it possibly linked to the "spiked vape"/ EVALI theory ??

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I want to point out that comparing the 4X cov. to 2500X cov. in your example is not really apples to apples. The former was done on MGI, probably using a standard gDNA extraction that would lose most of the plasmids during clean up, and the latter is a pacbio assembly that's obviously meant for max complete coverage. Also for what it's worth, I wouldn't trust the consensus accuracy on 5-10X short read assembly so any real alignment/variant analysis with these plasmid sequences is sus, imo. Really wish they provided the raw read data...

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Extremely interesting but one thing I'm stuck on is this:

"The nucleotide sequence is 73% identical to the virus and 88% identical to BNT162b2 and mRNA-1273. This implies codon optimization occurred"

If the P.aeruginosa spike sequence was a potential smoking gun for lab-leak (sequence date dependent) why would the sequence not align 100% to the "wild" virus spike? putting it another way if you'd already engineered a spike why would you re-engineer it again with "dumbed-down" codons?

I'm probably missing some important detail but would welcome someone to help me understand.

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