Big news from China on the search of the #OriginOfCovid - Head of Chinese WHO team attacks @MichaelWorobey paper: "unscientific to conclude that some early cases living close to the market was proof that it was the origin of the community transmission." 1/ archive.md/ybb2a
"Liang said Worobey did not verify the identity of a patient featured in The Paper’s video report. He said the first identified Covid-19 case did visit the hospital between December 6-8, and was accompanying a family member for a tooth extraction." 2/
"However, he also started experiencing cold-like symptoms such as headaches and dizziness on December 8. The female vendor from Huanan Market who had symptom onset on December 11, mentioned in the Science article, was not the first known Covid-19 case."
In short, Worobey had ruled out the Dec 8 case (who was not linked to the market) and wrote that the earliest known case was a woman who worked at the market. Now China says he is wrong, and puts the Dec 8 case back in the spotlight (of course without providing any new data) 🤷🏻♂️
One of the biggest issues is how can we get reliable information from China. Without reliable info, scientists find themselves in a difficult position, as they try to connect dots and draw conclusions based on sparse evidence and crumbles of data.
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…
Per chi volesse approfondire i temi trattati nel servizio di #PresaDiretta di ieri sera, ho raccolto in questo thread le fonti e i documenti principali citati in trasmissione. 🧵1/
Cominciamo dalla missione dell'#OMS a #Wuhan, all'inizio di quest'anno. Qui trovate il rapporto finale che considera "estremamente improbabile" l'incidente di laboratorio. 2/ who.int/publications/i…
One last thread on the origins of #SARSCoV2 before the upcoming publication of the US intelligence report. First of all, there are two things that might be even more important than the origin itself: research ethics and scientific debate. 1/
Since the beginning, some scientists working in Chinese institutions haven't been fully transparent. The history of #RaTG13 and the issues with its sequencing data, the miners pneumonia, the missing database, the pangolin CoV data. Hiding info, playing with words. Bad science. 2/
The second thing that I didn't like was the suppression of an open dialogue between scientists, which lasted for several months. Now it's easier for scientists to freely talk about the different scenarios, but do you remember how difficult it was one year ago? 3/
THREAD - What happened at the Huanan #seafood market?
The @WHO report is quite clear on this point: #SARSCoV2 might have jumped from a wild animal sold in this market and maybe other markets in #Wuhan. But what do we know exactly? 1/15
After all this time, the Huanan seafood market still remains the main suspect for a simple reason: most of the early cases had visited at least one market in Wuhan city, and several of them visited the Huanan market. 2/15
According to the report, 10,000 people visited this place every day, making it a perfect setting for an #outbreak. One might argue: what about the cases without market exposure? Good question! 3/15
La prima permette a SARS-COV-2 di legarsi meglio al recettore ACE2, in altre parole i virus con questa mutazione riescono a entrare più facilmente nelle nostre cellule. 1/
Variante inglese 🇬🇧 (B.1.1.7), sudafricana 🇿🇦 (B.1.351) e brasiliana 🇧🇷 (P.1) hanno tutte quante la mutazione N501Y.
Probabilmente, è proprio per questo motivo che queste varianti tendono a essere più contagiose. 2/
La E484K, invece, aiuta il virus a sfuggire agli #anticorpi, pertanto potrebbe ridurre in parte l'efficacia dei #vaccini.
La #varianteinglese non ha questa mutazione (per ora), ma brasiliana e sudafricana sì. Per questo sono così temute! 3/
Question for bioinformaticians! Believe it or not, the first genome of bat virus #RaTG13 had some nucleotides that were supported by zero reads: in other words, the genome didn't match the sequences that were used to assemble it. How is it possible? 1/ #originsofSARSCoV2
Assemblers are computer programs, they do not "invent" nucleotides. So, what happened here? My explanation was that this genome was assembled using other reads, maybe in addition to the ones that were uploaded. 2/
In that case, I expected the authors to upload the missing reads.. Instead they did the opposite: they updated the genome, replacing the nucleotides supported by zero reads with the correct ones. So, the question is: how the heck did they assemble the genome the first time? 3/