CommunityNews

CommunityNews

Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2?

To prevent future pandemics, it is important that we understand whether SARS-CoV-2 spilled over directly from animals to people, or indirectly in a laboratory accident. The genome of SARS-COV-2 contains a peculiar pattern of unique restriction endonuclease recognition sites allowing efficient dis- and re-assembly of the viral genome characteristic of synthetic viruses. Here, we report the likelihood of observing such a pattern in coronaviruses with no history of bioengineering. We find that SARS-CoV-2 is an anomaly, more likely a product of synthetic genome assembly than natural evolution. The restriction map of SARS-CoV-2 is consistent with many previously reported synthetic coronavirus genomes, meets all the criteria required for an efficient reverse genetic system, differs from closest relatives by a significantly higher rate of synonymous mutations in these synthetic-looking recognitions sites, and has a synthetic fingerprint unlikely to have evolved from its close relatives. We report a high likelihood that SARS-CoV-2 may have originated as an infectious clone assembled in vitro.

Read in full here:

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.18.512756v1

This thread was posted by one of our members via one of our news source trackers.

0 664 0

Where Next?

Popular Science Tech topics Top

First poster: bot
Some animals and plants are rapidly adapting to our warming, polluted world.
0 689 0
New
First poster: bot
Endemic Pathogens Are Making You Crazy And Then Killing You: Toxoplasmosis Spotlight. In February 2022, Jim Keller organized a scientifi...
0 535 0
New
First poster: bot
Monsanto’s Ghostwriting to Influence Science and Media. While most ghostwriting scandals in science involve physicians, the agrichemical...
2 550 0
New
First poster: bot
Three peer-reviewed papers highlight scientific results of National Ignition Facility record yield shot. After decades of inertial confi...
0 628 0
New
First poster: bot
Study first to link weed killer Roundup to convulsions in animals. A recent report by the United States Centers for Disease Control and ...
0 647 0
New
First poster: bot
Hydrogen production from the air - Nature Communications. While obtaining H2 from water splitting offers a promising strategy for renewa...
0 616 0
New
First poster: bot
Your annual reminder that science can be beautiful as well as informative.
0 566 0
New
CommunityNews
Scientists successfully unfroze rat organs and transplanted them — a ‘historic’ step that could someday transform transplant medicine. I...
0 434 0
New
CommunityNews
The universe is decaying much faster than thought. This is shown by calculations of three Dutch scientists on the so-called Hawking radia...
0 229 0
New
k.lee
Hello, my name is Kelly Lee, and I’m a developmental editor at The Pragmatic Bookshelf. I’m currently looking for technical reviewers for...
1 132 0
New

Other popular topics Top

Exadra37
I am thinking in building or buy a desktop computer for programing, both professionally and on my free time, and my choice of OS is Linux...
36 5432 10
New
AstonJ
Curious to know which languages and frameworks you’re all thinking about learning next :upside_down_face: Perhaps if there’s enough peop...
243 5922 95
New
Rainer
My first contact with Erlang was about 2 years ago when I used RabbitMQ, which is written in Erlang, for my job. This made me curious and...
195 6396 95
New
Maartz
Hi folks, I don’t know if I saw this here but, here’s a new programming language, called Roc Reminds me a bit of Elm and thus Haskell. ...
49 4462 14
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Author Spotlight James Stanier @jstanier James Stanier, author of Effective Remote Work , discusses how to rethink the office as we e...
29 4082 12
New
AstonJ
Was just curious to see if any were around, found this one: I got 51/100: Not sure if it was meant to buy I am sure at times the b...
4 3745 1
New
New
husaindevelop
Inside our android webview app, we are trying to paste the copied content from another app eg (notes) using navigator.clipboard.readtext ...
1 3243 0
New
First poster: bot
Large Language Models like ChatGPT say The Darnedest Things. The Errors They MakeWhy We Need to Document Them, and What We Have Decided ...
0 2920 0
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Develop, deploy, and debug BEAM applications using BEAMOps: a new paradigm that focuses on scalability, fault tolerance, and owning each ...
40 2292 21
New