I see they also discussed this in this latest episode of TWiV:
It’s not clear to me how this information supports an evolutionary origin. Can you elaborate a bit on this?
Looks like I was wrong on that point, at least in the opinion of the author.
Bloom — who co-authored a letter calling for a renewed investigation into the origins of the pandemic, including the possibility that the virus escaped or leaked from a lab5 — says his study sheds no light on the origins of the pandemic, nor on why the sequences were removed. But he hopes his efforts will encourage researchers to “think outside the box” and look to other sources, such as archival data, to glean more information from the early days of the pandemic. “There are probably more data out there,” he says.
Source
However, some time ago I predicted that new information would turn up, and it has. At least give me credit for that. ![]()
Unfortunately with one mistake though, I think. My comment on the video:
Hi Potholer, I enjoyed the video as always, but I can’t help but point out that you seem to have made an error at 12:55.
You say “researchers have found that the virus seems to have evolved in the presence of an immune system.” At the same time, you flash two articles on screen, the implication being that these articles support that the virus seems to have evolved in the presence of an immune system. The first article is “on the origin and evolution of SARS-CoV-2” by Singh and Yi in EMM, and the second is a sciencedaily article titled “Two studies support key role for immune system in shaping SARS-CoV-2 evolution”, that itself refers to two PLoS Pathogens papers by Ho et al. and Eguia et al.
As far as I can tell, nowhere in the Singh and Yi paper do they mention anything about the virus evolving in the presence of an immune system - the word “immune” is only used once in the paper, in an unrelated context, and I also read the rest of the paper but can’t find anything else that would constitute a discussion of the subject. The papers by Ho et al. and Equia et al. aren’t about the origin of SARS-CoV-2 at all, only it’s evolution in human populations since the start of the pandemic. Of course the virus is now evolving the presence of an immune system - the human immune system - in the midst of the pandemic, but that is totally unrelated to the question of how the virus originated.
You may have followed the long discussion on the presence of O-linked glycans around the furin cleavage site under your pinned comment on your “Did SARS-Cov-2 start in a chinese lab” video from last year. This was the tentative evidence the Andersen et al. Nature Medicine paper used to argue that the virus evolved in the presence of an immune system. It really doesn’t seem like this evidence has stood the test of time though, as the presence of the O-linked glycans was only an in silico prediction at the time, and since then experimental evidence hasn’t supported their presence in any quantity required to produce the hypothesised “mucin shield”.
I’m not aware of any good evidence for the virus originating the presence of an immune system. For everyone else reading this, that does NOT mean it didn’t, as there aren’t always obvious signs. It would be like saying “we don’t have the suspect on CCTV entering the house” - whether or not that constitutes evidence that the suspect is innocent is entirely dependent on whether there were any CCTV cameras around the house! If there were lots of cameras and he doesn’t show up on the video, that could be evidence, proof even, that we never entered the house. On the other hand, if there were no cameras, or only one low-resolution camera at a bad angle that only captures one corner of the house, then the fact that the suspect isn’t seen on the video is quite inconclusive. I would argue that we don’t have have conclusive evidence that the virus originated in the presence of an immune system, but we also have very limited ways of detecting this one way or another, so it doesn’t support a natural origin or a lab origin. Other evidence favours a natural origin, and we have to make do with that.
You say “researchers have found that the virus seems to have evolved in the presence of an immune system.”
Don’t all virus evolve in the presence of their hosts’ immune system?
Not if they’re hiding from genetic entropy in their animal reservoirs, where they don’t evolve at all.
Not if they were serially passaged through cell cultures in a lab, which is the argument potholer is responding to.
If it were the case that the virus evolved in the presence of a immune system, what would be the signature of such a phenomenon ?
That’s the rub, I don’t think there are any obvious signatures to look out for. Arguments could be made about signatures of selection at specific loci known to be involved in immune evasion, but I don’t know of any studies identifying this.
In their Nature Medicine paper, Andersen et al. proposed the O-glycosylation of 3 amino acid residues around the furin cleavage site on the spike protein formed a mucin shield to promote immune evasion, and since this is one of the unique features of SARS-CoV-2, that suggests these residues were selected for the in the presence of an immune system - ruling out an origin via passaging in cell culture. The problem is that this proposed O-glycosylation was based on in silico modelling, but since then experimental studies characterising the glycans on the spike protein have found that only really 1 of the 3 proposed amino acids is actually O-glycosylated, and even then at quite a low frequency, suggesting it can’t function in immune evasion, so Andersen et al’s hypothesis seems to have been wrong.
I haven’t seen any other proposals of evidence for evolution in the presence of an immune system.
OK, got it now.
Alert!!! Be on the lookout for not-too-unusual viruses!
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An edifying article from BMJ that questions the failure of contemporary science journalism
The very first paragraph gets it wrong, right off the bat:
The possibility of SARS-CoV-2 was never considered a debunked conspiracy theory. However, there are many conspiracy theories supporting a possible lab leak that have been debunked. There’s a big difference between the two. As of right now, there is no compelling evidence supporting a lab leak. As always, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
The latest review:
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