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The study is probably bunk and sensational. check the comments by this redditor : https://www.reddit.com/r/China_Flu/comments/ewt9ep/scientifi...

https://www.reddit.com/r/China_Flu/comments/ewuotw/discussio...

The real question is: how far are we from this becoming real ?

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Interesting, that user claims to be especially familiar with the 'gag' protein where the paper claims to find a match. User explicitly says that the "matching" portions claimed in the paper are so tiny as to be negligible, and not unique to HIV. They claim that this is easily verifiable with a simple 'blast' search. Could someone comment on these claims?

see https://twitter.com/trvrb/status/1223337991168380928

I BLASTed all 4 2019-nCoV insert sequences and agree with that user. The sequences are short and found in many other proteins. It is appropriate to trim out the gaps (relative to the HIV sequences) in inserts 3 & 4, reducing the length of the query. In other words, we have 4 sequences of lengths: 6, 6, 8, & 12 amino acids, where the alphabet of naturally occurring amino acids is N=20. Amino acid frequency in proteins in non-uniform.

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