Do you have a cite for previous work reporting or using this sequence (something like cct cgg cgg gca) for a cleavage site in viruses? I only ended up finding and looking through one bit of prior gain of function research that’s the sort of genetic engineering you’re hypothesizing ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3168280/ ) but it used a totally different sequence. Better yet, someone from pre-covid-19 times talking about how they made their code include “cggcgg” as a marker.
Richard Muller, co-author with Steven Quay of the WSJ article, states in his interview with Sky News Australia (Scientific report suggests Wuhan lab leak as origin of COVID-19, YouTube, 10 June 2021, at 5:40 mark) that CGG was the spelling of arginine “most used in the laboratory” in lab-inserted furin cleavage sites and was in fact used by Shi Zhengli at the WIV, as she reported in one of her published papers.
But Steven Quay’s mammoth 193-page Bayesian Analysis of SARS-Cov-2 Origin (https://zenodo.org/record/4477081#.YMU0-S0ZNE4) puts the number at only a half of lab experiments and suggests additional reasons for the choice, in addition to tracking, which seems to be mentioned as merely another “additional advantage”. See the section entitled “Evidence. Laboratory codon optimization uses CGG for laboratory insertions of arginine residues 50% of the time.” (p. 90)
The interpretation of “marker” as a deliberate research strategy for distinguishing lab-made from naturally occurring viruses is my own, and may be overstating the explicit intentions of researchers. It is derived from Steven Quay’s SJW article, specifically this passage:
“Although the double CGG is suppressed naturally, the opposite is true in laboratory work. The insertion sequence of choice is the double CGG. That’s because it is readily available and convenient, and scientists have a great deal of experience inserting it. An additional advantage of the double CGG sequence compared with the other 35 possible choices: It creates a useful beacon that permits the scientists to track the insertion in the laboratory.”
Still, deliberate or incidental, the presence of a double-CGG in the furin cleavage site of COVID-19 weighs heavily on the lab origin side of the probability argument, since its 50% use in lab insertions contrasts strongly with a 0% probability (so far) of finding it anywhere in the entire genome of all other viruses in the sarbecovirus sub-class of betacoronaviruses that SARS1, MERS & SARS2 belong to—none of which, apart from SARS2, even has a furin cleavage site.
Whatever the intentions of researchers, is there another interpretation of the empirical data that would alter Steven Quay’s “beyond a reasonable doubt” conclusion that the virus came from a lab?
What other factors could be at play here to qualify further the results of his Bayesian analysis?
Do you have a cite for previous work reporting or using this sequence (something like cct cgg cgg gca) for a cleavage site in viruses? I only ended up finding and looking through one bit of prior gain of function research that’s the sort of genetic engineering you’re hypothesizing ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3168280/ ) but it used a totally different sequence. Better yet, someone from pre-covid-19 times talking about how they made their code include “cggcgg” as a marker.
Richard Muller, co-author with Steven Quay of the WSJ article, states in his interview with Sky News Australia (Scientific report suggests Wuhan lab leak as origin of COVID-19, YouTube, 10 June 2021, at 5:40 mark) that CGG was the spelling of arginine “most used in the laboratory” in lab-inserted furin cleavage sites and was in fact used by Shi Zhengli at the WIV, as she reported in one of her published papers.
But Steven Quay’s mammoth 193-page Bayesian Analysis of SARS-Cov-2 Origin (https://zenodo.org/record/4477081#.YMU0-S0ZNE4) puts the number at only a half of lab experiments and suggests additional reasons for the choice, in addition to tracking, which seems to be mentioned as merely another “additional advantage”. See the section entitled “Evidence. Laboratory codon optimization uses CGG for laboratory insertions of arginine residues 50% of the time.” (p. 90)
The interpretation of “marker” as a deliberate research strategy for distinguishing lab-made from naturally occurring viruses is my own, and may be overstating the explicit intentions of researchers. It is derived from Steven Quay’s SJW article, specifically this passage:
“Although the double CGG is suppressed naturally, the opposite is true in laboratory work. The insertion sequence of choice is the double CGG. That’s because it is readily available and convenient, and scientists have a great deal of experience inserting it. An additional advantage of the double CGG sequence compared with the other 35 possible choices: It creates a useful beacon that permits the scientists to track the insertion in the laboratory.”
Still, deliberate or incidental, the presence of a double-CGG in the furin cleavage site of COVID-19 weighs heavily on the lab origin side of the probability argument, since its 50% use in lab insertions contrasts strongly with a 0% probability (so far) of finding it anywhere in the entire genome of all other viruses in the sarbecovirus sub-class of betacoronaviruses that SARS1, MERS & SARS2 belong to—none of which, apart from SARS2, even has a furin cleavage site.
Whatever the intentions of researchers, is there another interpretation of the empirical data that would alter Steven Quay’s “beyond a reasonable doubt” conclusion that the virus came from a lab?
What other factors could be at play here to qualify further the results of his Bayesian analysis?