Thread by @emmecola

Someone found in a #Moderna patent from 2017 a short nucleotide sequence that is identical to the one encoding for the Furin Cleavage Site in SARS-CoV-2. While this may seem suspicious at first sight, I'll try to explain why there's "nothing to see here". 1/

First of all, the nucleotide sequence is really there. It is located in sequence 11652 from patent US 9587003, position 2733-2751 (revers strand). The Genbank ID is KH664781. 2/
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/KH6647…

The Moderna patent covers "modified polynucleotides for the production of oncology-related proteins and peptides". In other words, these are RNA molecules that are used in #cancer therapy, and were modified in order to improve the efficacy of treatment. 3/
lens.org/lens/patent/19…

Sequence 11652 is annotated as "artificial", however if we analyze it using blastx, we find an almost perfect full-length match with NP_002430.3 (MSH3), which is a human protein involved in DNA repair. Clearly it makes sense, since the patent deals with cancer therapy. 4/

Moreover, if we translate the sequence using a tool like ExPASy translate, we notice that the short sequence does not encode for PRRAR in this protein, but rather YVPAE (which is not a furin cleavage site). The translation is from 5' to 3' in frame 1. 5/

In conclusion, despite the name "Moderna", this sequence has nothing to do with furin cleavage sites, vaccines or coronaviruses. It is just an RNA molecule encoding for a human protein that, by chance, has a short stretch of nucleotides identical to SARS-CoV-2.