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Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally

sciencemag.org

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Re: Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally

#31

Post by mc32 »

superzamp wrote: post #29
allovernow wrote: post #2

There is a recently opened P4 biolab in Wuhan within miles of the seafood market in question, with researchers who have recently been working with and publishing on the topic of Corona viruses, including research on human transmission. Not to be sensationalist, and personally I think the title is alarmist, but are a number of suspicious elements to this story that are worth examining: https://medium.com/@siradrianbon…

Currently reading a (French) book regarding France-China industrial espionage and relations that was published well before the virus outbreak. Funnily enough, the author describes quite extensively how this P4 in Wuhan came into existence and all the subsequent problems faced by France to get China to honor the deal. I quote/translate: "In the course of these fifteen years, China has several times failed to live up t…

They have to be naive as VW if they believed the CCP would honor the contract...

Re: Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally

#32

Post by fourstar »

sct202 wrote: post #14
tempsy wrote: post #12

Yeah I have a hard time believing it has been definitively proven that the market was the source of the virus. Wouldn’t that mean they have the carcass of whatever animal transmitted the virus in their possession? And did the first person known to have contracted it actually say they went there?

Why would they have a carcass of something someone ate at least a week before they got sick they caught the virus?

That's exactly the point of the OP.

Re: Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally

#33

Post by rococode »

zozbot234 wrote: post #9
erichocean wrote: post #5

"Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag" https://biorxiv-cache.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/2020.01.30.... > [ABSTRACT] We are currently witnessing a major epidemic caused by the 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV). The evolution of 2019-nCoV remains elusive. We found 4 insertions in the spike glycoprotein (S) which are unique to the 2019-nCoV and are not present in ot…

FWIW, https://old.reddit.com/user/BurrShotFirst1804 is claiming that this (preprint, unreviewed) paper is very misleading, speaking as (supposedly) someone highly familiar with at least one of these HIV proteins. Not sure what to make of either the paper itself or this response to it.

Copying /u/BurrShotFirst1804's main response here for easier reference:

=====

This study is crap.

My comment from another thread. This paper isn't peer reviewed or published. It's just an online journal.

I've worked pretty closely with gag in my PhD thesis. Gag is the conglomerate protein that gets cut by the protease to generate the hiv capsid, matrix, and carrier proteins. Gp120 is the receptor protein.

This is a really fucking dumb study and these scientists should be ashamed. Those amino acids are so short. They just went and looked for a virus to match. You can go and blast the amino acids yourself. Just copy and paste from the journal entry into NCBIs BLASTp. I did it and there's hundreds of matches to those sequences. HIV didn't even come up in the first 100. The 4th residue is missing like 6 amino acids. There are conserved regions in viruses. Their "gp120" match compares 6 amino acids out of 850 in the whole protein for example.

They found 4 sections that were in the new virus but not SARS. They then took these differences and ran them against all known viral proteins. They only looked at proteins with 100% matches, but if you look at the table they didn't match 100% for alignment. So like one is ABCEFG and they match it to an HIV protein that is ABCXYZEFG and they are calling those total matches. There's also tons of viruses that match these tiny sequences, they just noticed all 4 have HIV matches so they ignore the other matches and only looked at HIV.

Go blast it yourself if you want.

Re: Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally

#34

Post by Fomite »

allovernow wrote: post #2

There is a recently opened P4 biolab in Wuhan within miles of the seafood market in question, with researchers who have recently been working with and publishing on the topic of Corona viruses, including research on human transmission. Not to be sensationalist, and personally I think the title is alarmist, but are a number of suspicious elements to this story that are worth examining: https://medium.com/@siradrianbon…

- Every laboratory exposure-related outbreak I've encountered has been trivially easy to trace back to that event.

- Most high-end virology labs are doing research on human to human transmission of corona viruses. They're a major emerging type of virus we don't understand, and a Chinese lab working on them is even less surprising.

- If this was a bioweapon, it sucks.

Re: Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally

#35

Post by KaoruAoiShiho »

gravelc wrote: post #23
erichocean wrote: post #5

"Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag" https://biorxiv-cache.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/2020.01.30.... > [ABSTRACT] We are currently witnessing a major epidemic caused by the 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV). The evolution of 2019-nCoV remains elusive. We found 4 insertions in the spike glycoprotein (S) which are unique to the 2019-nCoV and are not present in ot…

This is laughable. Table 1 shows four alignments. The first two are only six contiguous residues, so can easily happen by chance. Three has multiple mistmatches as well as the gap (red). Four has an even larger gap to get the alignment. Take any two viruses and there's a decent likelihood of finding similar alignments.

Thanks honestly reassuring.

- Some layman.

Re: Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally

#36

Post by filoleg »

Aperocky wrote: post #27
allovernow wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read the article before you dismissed this? The links are a little more substantial than 9/11 conspiracies. And the mechanism is far less far-fetched, considering that on at least one instance SARS was confirmed as having escaped a research lab much like the one in question. https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20040423/china-sars-death

There are 23 genome publicly available, And it’s closely identifies with existing coronavirus from bats and are further away from SARS. I am not a biologist, tell me should I trust the existing science or your story? It was said that the virus might not have originated from the market itself, people who actually raised or caught these wild animals might have gotten it first. But to make a jump from that to the biolab…

I don't think that the author of the parent comment has some "i don't believe the system" sentiment, tinfoil hat style.

For example, I definitely trust CDC (the US one). However, I am vary of trusting Chinese authorities and agencies when it comes to this issue, as they have shown before that they are willing to go to extreme lengths to hide the truth when revealing it casts a bad light or reveals some info. I have no strong opinion on the true source of the virus, as there isn't simply enough info and time to do a proper investigation by CDC, but it is easily imaginable how much the reputation of China will get damaged if it gets discovered that the virus was born out of one of their labs.

Re: Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally

#37

Post by superzamp »

mc32 wrote: post #31
superzamp wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currently reading a (French) book regarding France-China industrial espionage and relations that was published well before the virus outbreak. Funnily enough, the author describes quite extensively how this P4 in Wuhan came into existence and all the subsequent problems faced by France to get China to honor the deal. I quote/translate: "In the course of these fifteen years, China has several times failed to live up t…

They have to be naive as VW if they believed the CCP would honor the contract...

Yeah the whole thing is basically a shitshow. The majority of the French administration was against the deal as well as many other countries but the president at the time forced the deal to go through.

Re: Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally

#38

Post by Fomite »

m_alexgr wrote: post #16
zozbot234 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, https://old.reddit.com/user/BurrShotFirst1804 is claiming that this (preprint, unreviewed) paper is very misleading, speaking as (supposedly) someone highly familiar with at least one of these HIV proteins. Not sure what to make of either the paper itself or this response to it.

Difficult to properly peer review when things are moving so quickly.

Plenty of things are being peer reviewed properly with this outbreak. But you can't take preprints in biology as any more holy writ than you can the occasional post on arXiv where someone claims to have come up with a complete unified model for physics, or solved a previously intractable problem.

Re: Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally

#39

Post by Fomite »

diminish wrote: post #11

> “The virus came into that marketplace before it came out of that marketplace,” Lucey asserts. What's the original source for the "Wuhan seafood market" hypothesis?

A large number of what we believe are the primary cases have exposure to said market.

Re: Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally

#40

Post by soperj »

Aperocky wrote: post #27
allovernow wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read the article before you dismissed this? The links are a little more substantial than 9/11 conspiracies. And the mechanism is far less far-fetched, considering that on at least one instance SARS was confirmed as having escaped a research lab much like the one in question. https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20040423/china-sars-death

There are 23 genome publicly available, And it’s closely identifies with existing coronavirus from bats and are further away from SARS. I am not a biologist, tell me should I trust the existing science or your story? It was said that the virus might not have originated from the market itself, people who actually raised or caught these wild animals might have gotten it first. But to make a jump from that to the biolab…

The part about not going to the moon that always baffles me, is when I start asking questions like "Were the Saturn Rockets fake? were the satellites launched fake? Do you believe the ISS is currently being faked? the Space Shuttle? Any of the SpaceX stuff that is currently happening?" and they believe that stuff is real.

If that's all real, then why couldn't they land on the moon?

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