Recovering deleted early SARS-CoV-2 sequences
June 23, 2021 7:45 AM Subscribe
Jesse Bloom studies the evolution of viruses and proteins. He found that Chinese researchers had submitted genetic sequences from cases in Wuhan early in the pandemic to NIH’s Sequence Read Archive, but soon deleted those records (NIH allows this and it’s not necessarily suspicious). Bloom located the deleted records in Google Cloud and “I recovered files for the 34 early samples that were virus positive. I was able to use the data in the files to reconstruct partial viral sequences (from start of spike to end of ORF10) for 13 of these samples.” The reconstructed sequences throw doubt on the theory that the virus emerged from the Huanan Seafood Market. Preprint; Twitter thread explainer. (h/t Fred Barrett)
This post was deleted for the following reason: There's a discussion of this in the open covid origins thread, better to keep that all together there. -- LobsterMitten
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