Francisco de Asis Profile picture
May 12, 2021 15 tweets 8 min read Read on X
[Thread] New WIV theses found by @TheSeeker268. Let's make some comments on very important findings
1/ MSc thesis of Wang, 2nd co-author of the article of the first 4 trips to the mine (Ge et al., 2016), and dated 2 years before this article and can be considered as some of the first steps of this research
She states that "fever patient sera were obtained from a hospital in Yunnan Province". Very vague description! But later, in the Fig 2.6 there is an important clue: samples are named as "MJ123", using one of WIV standard naming formats...
2 letters plus 3 digits for correlative IDs. Those two letters represent the initials of the syllables of the location. We have seen that in other publications: JN (JinNing), WH (WuHan), FG (FuGong). There is no doubt MJ is Mojiang. They were screening the county for more cases! Image
This is also very important to understand the kind of test they could have made on miner's samples and on suspected cases in Mojiang, and the problems they faced ImageImage
This also shows they had sequenced the N protein of 4991 and other viruses but decided not to disclose two years later in Ge et al. (2016)
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If there was still any doubt, this thesis clearly shows that sample 3755 came from the mine. And not only they sequenced the N, they also sequenced the S, which it is still unpublished. Fig 3.1
May be @c_drosten can help here?
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They only obtained partial sequences and faced some problems, probably due to inappropriate primers. DRASTIC already hypothesize this last summer and have a long discussion. This can explain the delay in finding the cause of the miners outbreak
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2/ PhD thesis of Zeng, quite relevant also. Can be considered the precursor of the crucial article of Hu et al. (2017), published a few months later
The abstract explains and lists quite well live isolates and infectious clones obtained. Much better than Hu et al. (2017), in fact. If anyone still had doubts: Rs4874 was not a pure live isolate but a infectious clone. This was the "optimized protocol"!
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3/ MSc thesis of Yu, precursor of Yu et al. (2019) (link below). It shows very important data regarding 4991 and clade 7896. And a new important clade to follow: clade 8561
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
Pay close attention to Table 3.2.
It is a way to check if RaTG13 aa seq is real! (note: not for validating nt seq). Here the results and the errors.
Big deviation in the S of 4991!
Notes:
- ORF8 gene not easily comparable
- they truncate to 1st decimal ImageImage
Also pay atention to a new virus: Rs8561. Its identities (vs Tor2) correlate very well with Ra4991, so they could be somehow similar. In fact, it is the 3rd closest WIV clade to SARS-CoV-2 according to the RdRp disclosed by Latinne et al. (2020)
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They had the spikes of the clade 7896 and other parts of the genome. Still unpublished. It would be worth it if an expert tried to extract information from these primers
Fig 3.5 [ORF8] of Yu (2019), manually OCR by @Drinkwater5Reed
- Ra4991 ORF8 is 100% identical to RaTG13 ORF8 at nt level
- Rspp7896, Ra7909 and Rspp7952 have very novel ORF8
pastebin.com/ug9Kb6YZ

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More from @franciscodeasis

Jun 26
🧵 We are revealing previously unpublished bat ACE2 sequences from undisclosed sites in Yunnan (our best guess is Mojiang and Chuxiong). These ACE2 sequences were unearthed from Bingjie Hu’s 2018 MSc thesis, submitted a year before the outbreak.


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Comparing sample IDs of bat ACE2 seqs of Hu’s thesis and Guo et al. (2020) we identified 3 unpublished seqs from an unspecified trip to Yunnan (possibly 8th trip to Mojiang) and 2 more seqs (possibly Chuxiong). Similar to how we identified the 7896 clade.
The 3 unpublished samples (possibly from Mojiang) are depicted in Fig 3.2, and sourced from Rhinolophus pusillus (Rpu, as in RpYN06 or BANAL-103)
YunNan_9483_Rpu
YunNan_9487_Rpu
YunNan_9527_Rpu
Note: WIV never reported Rpu’s from Yunnan, although the HKU team did from Mojiang. Image
Read 12 tweets
Aug 11, 2023
🧵Natural and non-natural live isolates (WIV & related)
TLDR:
- A substantial portion of the research remains unpublished.
- Missing live isolate WIV15.
- No samples, isolates, chimeric and MA viruses in 2017-2019?
- What is "Rs4874" really?
https://t.co/9JPusWbl9l
Image
First, it is very important to distinguish between a sequence and an isolated virus. Isolating a virus is very difficult. The ratio is perhaps one in hundreds sequenced. WIV has obtained thousands of virus sequences but only a few live viruses.


AVC Panel… https://t.co/4upna76jru
twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
WIV have a special series of live isolates:

"We tentatively named the novel isolates BtAdV WIV9–11, based on the order of live viruses isolated in our laboratory at WIV".


"According to the naming order for live viruses isolated in our laboratory at the… https://t.co/3cEoHjXFmWmicrobiologyresearch.org/content/journa…
twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
Read 23 tweets
Jul 11, 2023
Let's go on an Easter egg hunt inside the pdf 🧵
Page 4: more on the timeline by Eddie
Page 10: some more remarks by Fauci
Page 13: longer version and remarks by Farrar
Page 16: answer by Nature


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Page 19: Drosten here?
Page 19: More context back and forth with Nature
Page 20: longer Slack chat
Page 23: same email as page 13 (+ 1 more line)


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Read 15 tweets
Mar 4, 2023
New pre-print from WIV, ht @babarlelephant.
Some initial comments while we wait for the release of the accessions.
biorxiv.org/content/10.110…
They finally correct the Mojiang mine GPS coordinates. Although still with a 9 km error
(note the greyed area in Google Maps)
First time they acknowledge going to Jingne (in 2018). I was blocked by EHA for asking about this place. Another mine there?
Read 6 tweets
Jul 26, 2022
It is completely rewritten. Hardly any original sentence from the pre-print remains. The most significant change is the last sentence of the Abstract:
Misc:
- Rambaut now more involved (added to "Software" and "Data curation" in the contributions).
- The 155 cases turned now into 156 cases.
- Fig 1E then vs now (they forgot to update Fig 2B too).
- Fig 1A: many cases shifted East hundreds of m.
Clear misrepresentation by Rasmussen
Read 6 tweets
Feb 9, 2022
Judge yourself. They were looking for new SARS viruses different from SARS1 but this one found investigating a COVID-like outbreak in miners was not interesting and they made a mistake saying the miners had SARS antibodies.
80% identical means 20% different. I remember seeing that number somewhere before...
RaTG13 was baptized on January 2, 2020 or 1-2 days later. Not what they have been saying until now
Read 7 tweets

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