Here’s how scientists know the coronavirus was NOT prepared in a laboratory

You’ve heard conspiracy theories: the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus now sweeping the world was created in a laboratory in Wuhan, China.

Don’t buy Chinese history: the coronavirus may have leaked from a laboratory, the New york post replied on February 11.

The story says that Chinese leader Xi Jinping did not admit that the now devastating coronavirus of large swathes of China had escaped from one of the country’s biological research laboratories. But the next day, evidence emerged suggesting that this is exactly what happened, when the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology issued a new directive called: Instructions on Strengthening Biosafety Management in microbiology laboratories that handle advanced viruses such as the new coronavirus.

It turns out that in all of China, there is only one. And this one is located in the Chinese city of Wuhan which happens to be the epicenter of the epidemic. That is true. China’s only level 4 microbiology laboratory, equipped to treat deadly coronaviruses, called the National Biosafety Laboratory, is part of the Wuhan Virology Institute.

This rumor has spread even faster than the virus itself.

But a new analysis of SARS-CoV-2 should put an end to this conspiracy theory, according to a group of researchers. They compared the genome of the new coronavirus with the other seven coronaviruses known to infect humans and drew a clear conclusion: Our analyzes clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a deliberately manipulated virus, did they write in the review Nature medicine.

Researchers compared SARS, MERS and SARS-CoV-2, HKU1, NL63, OC43 and 229E and compared the receptor binding domain (RBD) and how it binds to receptors called ACE-2 (to be very technical, ACE-2 is a type I transmembrane metallocarboxypeptidase with homology to ACE).

The SARS-CoV-2 RBD is optimized to bind to human ACE2 with an effective solution different from those previously predicted. Furthermore, if genetic manipulation had been carried out, one of the many reverse genetic systems available for betacoronavirus would probably have been used. However, the genetic data irrefutably show that SARS-CoV-2 is not derived from any previously used virus backbone, the researchers wrote.

Instead, they propose two scenarios that may explain the origin of SARS-CoV-2: natural selection in a host animal before zoonotic transfer; and natural selection in humans after zoonotic transfer.

As many early cases of COVID-19 were linked to the Huanan market in Wuhan, it is possible that an animal source is present there. Given the similarity of SARS-CoV-2 with SARS-CoV type coronaviruses², it is likely that bats serve as reservoir hosts for their progenitor. Although RaTG13, sampled from aRhinolophus affinisbat, is roughly 96% identical overall to SARS-CoV-2, its peak diverges in RBD, suggesting that it may not bind effectively to human ACE2.

An ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 may have jumped in humans, acquiring the genomic characteristics described above through adaptation during undetected human-to-human transmission. Once acquired, these adaptations would allow the pandemic to take off and produce a large enough group of cases to trigger the surveillance system that detected it.

The overall molecular structure of this virus is distinct from known coronaviruses and rather resembles viruses found in bats and pangolins that had been little studied and never known to cause harm to humans, write the researchers.

If someone were looking to design a new coronavirus as a pathogen, they would have built it from the backbone of a virus known to cause the disease, according to a statement by Scripps Search. If someone was looking to design a new coronavirus as a pathogen, they would have built it from the backbone of a virus known to cause disease. But the scientists discovered that the skeleton of SARS-CoV-2 differed considerably from that of the already known coronaviruses and resembled mainly related viruses found in bats and pangolins.

These two characteristics of the virus, mutations in the RBD portion of the peak protein and its distinct backbone, preclude laboratory manipulation as a potential origin for SARS-CoV-2, said Kristian Andersen, associate professor of immunology and microbiology to Scripps Research and corresponding author on paper.