The laboratory variant is recognized as the most likely
The likelihood of the natural origin of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus was questioned by the head of the MIPT genomic engineering laboratory, virologist Pavel Volchkov. On Wednesday, experts discussed the versions of the origin of the coronavirus at a round table organized at the Izvestia press center
First of all, Volchkov recalled that scientists do not yet have direct evidence of both natural and laboratory origin of the virus. According to him, it is the person and his activities that can “shift” the randomness of the interspecies transition of the virus towards the highest probability. He demonstrated this with the example of a poultry farm, where about seven people were recently infected with avian influenza. “This is a random event,” says Volchkov, “but it was created by human hands. What is a poultry farm? This is a huge number of chickens, occupying an area comparable to Red Square. When a person intentionally collects organisms of the same species, and when a virus accidentally flies in there (most likely from the person himself), then a local outbreak begins among the organisms. Due to the large number of birds, many billions of viral particles are produced for each one, as a result of which you get the math when the impossible becomes possible. The likelihood that the same will happen in nature is very small. The randomness of the origin of the mutation, which makes it possible to make an interspecies transition to humans in nature, is unlikely. “
Turning to the question of the origin of the coronavirus that causes covid-19, the scientist noted the laboratory option as more likely: “What would I, as a virologist, do to investigate the genetic pathogenicity of the collection of viruses that I have collected? First of all, I would try – do the 200-1000 available viruses infect human cells? ” He stressed that roughly the same goals are said in a sensational article in Nature 2015, in which a group of American and Chinese scientists describe their research. True, that group, according to Volchkov, could not have checked every natural coronavirus for a long time and tediously, but began immediately to train on the S-protein, to come up with mutations that it needed in order to make up a chimeric (combined, for example, with the SARS virus) 1) of the virus, he was able to acquire a certain ability to infect human cells.
Note that shortly before moving to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, such studies, called Gain of Function, were banned in the United States by Barack Obama. And many scientists abroad directly accused the group of specialists working in Wuhan. The essence of the accusations is that, based on the natural scaffold of the coronavirus found in Chinese cave bats, they artificially attached a new “spike” to it (the same protein S) and turned it into SARS-Cov-2 infectious for humans.
Professor of the Department of Genomics and Bioinformatics of the Siberian Federal University, Professor of the University of Göttingen, Konstantin Krutovsky, in turn, confirmed that SARS-CoV-2 is chimeric, recombinant and has an unusual, so-called furin insert of four amino acids on the very “spine” that helps the virus infect human cells more efficiently. But other natural viruses have similar ones. “The only question is whether the virus we are discussing has signs that it has been experimented with or not. Then it will be proof of its artificial origin in the laboratory. “
Pavel Volchkov recalled that the technology of the so-called “reverse genetics”, when researchers make such changes in the genome of the virus, which then cannot be distinguished from natural, is extremely developed today. “We can create very cool structures. When I combine information from a published article in Nature with the fact that the researchers possessed a collection of coronaviruses, and compare all this, the likelihood of laboratory origin seems to me an order of magnitude higher. “
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