Nice interview of @mvankerkhove @WHO by @sciencecohen @ScienceMagazine

I agree that nobody knows whether we are or not going to know the origin of SARS-CoV-2.
But we know of still missing data/samples:
1/
science.org/content/articl… still missing data/samples:
- evaluation of the farm-animal and wild-life trades from South-East Asia to China
- human samples collected through national surveillance programs before Dec 2019 (in various countries)
- new virus sampling from the Mojiang RaTG13 cave
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Four new preprints were posted in the last few days about the #Huanan #market and #COVID19 #Origin
1/ Some scientists tend to think that an initial animal-to-human transmission occured at this market (2 new preprints going in that direction)
whereas others believe that the market was simply the location of an early ‘superspreading’ event (the new CCDC preprint).
2/

I am quite surprised by @angie_rasmussen's comment yesterday at the 7 Oct BMJ webinar
(video: and webpage: bmj.com/covid-19-webin…)
1/ First, the "Calisher paper" should rather be named the "Daszak paper" as it was found out afterwards by @USRTK that Daszak was the lead author or coordinator of the effort, although he didn't appear as first author - usrtk.org/biohazards-blo…
2/

@TheSeeker268 ZL Shi indicated in July 2020 in Science that the 5' end of RaTG13 was missing from their sequence: sciencemag.org/sites/default/… @TheSeeker268 Note: how did they know that the missing 5' piece was 15 nucleotide long in July 2020?

@K_G_Andersen Thank you so much for taking the time to lay down your arguments about this furin cleavage site. This is very useful and highly needed.
Yes, there is one aspect that you are missing, which has been bothering me:
1/ @K_G_Andersen This FCS was noted as "cleavage site" in a January 2020 publication by Zheng-Li Shi and colleagues (before the Nature paper):
"we predicted that the cleavage site for generating S1 and S2 subunits is located at R694/S695"
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
2/

One of the best papers I read in the last few years:
Sudhir Kumar @cathyqqtao @stvnwvr @sergeilkp & al.
reconstructed virus evolution using cancer mutation lineage tracing approach @TempleUniv
@biorxivpreprint

biorxiv.org/content/10.110… The authors examined #SARSCoV2 evolution and found that all sequences originate from
proCoV2, the mother genome of all #SARSCoV2 sequences.
The reference SARSCoV2 sequence from 24 December (Wuhan‐1;EPI_ISL 402123) has 3 mutations compared to proCoV2.
2/