I continue to state that most of what is being said by absolutely anyone about furin (and synonymous codon choice, in this case) to support lab ideas is simply nonsense. There is nothing particularly interesting at all about the genetics.
Most of what is said about all of that suggesting it is suspicious is truly ‘not even wrong’.
Insertions and deletions happen all the time rather than being some kind of rare freak event. They can be random gobbeldygook or they can be short sequence insertions from something else.
Lots of other coronaviruses have insertions and deletions at the same spot rather than it being something rare, just the creation of this particular type of cleavage site is rare. However, this cleavage site is known to increase host breadth and cell type breadth, so if you are conditioning on seeing something that jumped species it’s more likely. Other less closely related viruses have furin sites, but the SARS-like viruses are severely undersampled.
I honestly don’t even know what the codon choice people are arguing. You are creating a new insertion, not looking at the rest of the genome, why would the content of the rest of the genome be relevant to the odds of using a particular codon? Also, these codons are not selected against, they have kept up fine in the human population.
So this is sort of the same fallacy as the OJ Simpson defense team, where they argued something based on probability and failed to condition on something known?
I continue to state that most of what is being said by absolutely anyone about furin (and synonymous codon choice, in this case) to support lab ideas is simply nonsense. There is nothing particularly interesting at all about the genetics.
Can you elaborate? I was a bit suspicious of this part of Wade’s article. It reminded me of the “watchmaker” argument.
Most of what is said about all of that suggesting it is suspicious is truly ‘not even wrong’.
Insertions and deletions happen all the time rather than being some kind of rare freak event. They can be random gobbeldygook or they can be short sequence insertions from something else.
Lots of other coronaviruses have insertions and deletions at the same spot rather than it being something rare, just the creation of this particular type of cleavage site is rare. However, this cleavage site is known to increase host breadth and cell type breadth, so if you are conditioning on seeing something that jumped species it’s more likely. Other less closely related viruses have furin sites, but the SARS-like viruses are severely undersampled.
I honestly don’t even know what the codon choice people are arguing. You are creating a new insertion, not looking at the rest of the genome, why would the content of the rest of the genome be relevant to the odds of using a particular codon? Also, these codons are not selected against, they have kept up fine in the human population.
So this is sort of the same fallacy as the OJ Simpson defense team, where they argued something based on probability and failed to condition on something known?