Ctcctcggcgggcacgtag is unique to both SARS-CoV-2 and Moderna's 2015/2016 patents
Some questions from a layperson:<p>1. Why do we care so much about a furin cleavage site? The author makes a big deal out of this and I&#x27;m not sure why. It seems like he specifically looked at the gene sequence at a furin cleavage site and then said: hey look, this occurs at a furin cleavage site! It must mean something! (Thanks to etaoins for finding at least some evidence that furin cleavage sites are not, in fact, unusual in Coronaviruses, although I have not read the paper: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencedirect.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;article&#x2F;pii&#x2F;S1873506120304165" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencedirect.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;article&#x2F;pii&#x2F;S187350612...</a>)<p>2. What does HIV-1 have to do with anything? That is, if these sequences all matched virus XYZ instead, would that also be some sort of smoking gun? The top 3 sequences all seem to be very common among lots of viruses (rotavirus, measles, coronaviruses, and HIV all show up in the top 3 lists). So he seems to have found a single sequence that lots and lots of viruses have (at least variants of), and that one sequence is the first 3 rows of his table. Am I missing something?<p>3. If we ignore every result entered after Feb 2020, aren&#x27;t we throwing out a lot of sequences that were entered specifically because people were suddenly all very interested in Coronaviruses? If he&#x27;s making claims like &quot;these don&#x27;t appear in any other Coronavirus<i>&quot;, the &quot;</i>except those we found after everyone started looking at Coronaviruses much more&quot; somewhat detracts from that, doesn&#x27;t it?<p>It feels a little bit like finding a passage &quot;He froze, trembling with fear&quot; and saying: the English language has 1 million words, so the probability of finding these 5 words in order is (1 million)^5. Therefore if we find it in two novels, one must have plagiarized the other. But not really though, because &quot;he&quot; and &quot;with&quot; are extremely common words, and &quot;froze&quot;, &quot;trembling&quot;, and &quot;fear&quot; are very highly correlated to each other. I think it&#x27;s pretty clear his first 3 examples are all highly correlated.<p>His last example (and the title of this post) seem a little harder to explain to me as a layperson, but I&#x27;d note that for a 30-nucleotide sequence, there are 3^30 other sequences that are only a single mutation away. We again see Rotavirus on his list. How far away is that Rotavirus sequence, and do we think it prohibitively unlikely this sequence came from Rotavirus?