The Science Suggests a Wuhan Lab Leak

important information: the genetic code is redundant, there are more than one codons corresponding to an amino acid. keep in mind a codon is three "letters"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GeneticCode21-version-2.s... [start at centre find first letter move to ring 2 find second move to ring 3 find third, find amino acid coded] notice that there is more than one codon corresponding to most amino acids, and some codons are control words.

also you needto look at 2 things, regarding Fig1b

there is comparison between two different coronavirus CoV-ZXC21 [upper sequence] vs. the 2019-nCoV [lowersequence]

the regions are different 651-661 in the first case, and the region 676-690 in the second case[2019CoV] these are different coronavirus so this is expected however they both correspond to a domain of the Spike protien [S]

what is being demonstrated is that there is a region in the 2019-CoV spike protien that is "novel" ; 2019-CoV predecessors dont have this sequence. this sequence is a cleavage recognition site. this in basic terms "arms" the coronavirus to fuse with a cell when cloven at the sequence by "furin"

this means the 2019-CoV is more likely to initiate fusion functions inside of a host rather than elsewhere, thus more viral copies would be capable of actually causing infection before being disrupted by the surroundings.

the basis of many gain of function research gone wrong concerns is the presence of this cleavage recognition sequence. The Double codon insertion is being used to bolster the idea that this is engineered, the major fault in the premise is that there is no natural way for such insertion to occur.

look at TABLE1 below Fig1 and you will see that other coronavirus as well as conspecific virus have such a cleavage site thus a natural origin for the sequence is not impossible.

i have mentioned recombination, and transversion as completely plausible natural phenomenon that have been recognized for some time, thus the statement that there is no natural way for this [insertion] to occur is fallacious.

[reply] also, duplication of a codon is usually associated with some sort of damage to the molecule, is implicated in the genetic basis of numerous cancer outcomes, and is usually accompanied by a 16 base pair insertion in the case of DNA, as an artefact of the repair.

the CoV has a different enzyme that does similar repair task in addition to reading out the code thus incurring small span insertions, that are later proof read to clean up alignment mismatches.

there are cases such as influenza, corresponding to a single point insertion, rather than codon duplication that correspond to a jump in lethality such as the Heamagglutinin of influenza virus, leading to the 1918 Flu gaining lethality after pandemic distribution in a "second wave"

this insertion point is a cleavage site for the protien.

i am not assuming, the claim is made very clearly multiple times through the article , and the WSJ article , has cherry picked the publication. there is no basis to the claim that 2 arginine codons adjacent to each other is a rare, engineered event, this [codon duplication]is a very common artefect of natural nucleotide repair mechanisms, also the article suffers from a deficiency of understanding, as the duplication of a lesion associated codon is also accompanied with a guide segment of nucleotide so the feature is more than just a duplicated codon. there is also the case of transversion and this has not been addressed, but could be illuminated with radio phosphorous labeling and restriction fragment analysis.

> if one goes by science and science alone

The press article is not very technical. The research paper is more interesting, but IIUC it is mostly about how this "furin cleavage" is very important and why it's important that is has two amino acids, but the discussion about the possible mutation to reach it is very shallow.

I'd like to see an accurate model of all the known ways the virus can mutate, tweaked to model origin of the current known species of coronavirus, and then use the model to get an estimation of the origin that is impossible, and then "use science" to conclude that the handmade origin is likely.