Now, a researcher in Seattle has dug up deleted files from Google Cloud that reveal 13 partial genetic sequences for some of the earliest cases of COVID-19 in Wuhan, Carl Zimmer reported for The New York Times.
Until now, the earliest sequences are primarily those sampled from cases at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, which was initially thought to be where the novel coronavirus first emerged at the end of December 2019.
Now, Jesse Bloom of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Seattle has found the deleted sequences - likely some of the earliest samples - also were devoid of those mutations.
According to Zimmer, about a year ago 241 genetic sequences from coronavirus patients had gone missing from an online database called Sequence Read Archive that's maintained by the National Institutes of Health.
Bloom noticed the missing sequences when he came across a spreadsheet in a study published in May 2020 in the journal PeerJ in which the authors list 241 genetic sequences of SARS-CoV-2 through the end of March 2020; the sequences were part of a Wuhan University project called PRJNA612766 and were supposedly uploaded to the Sequence Read Archive.
His sleuthing revealed that the deleted sequences had been collected by Aisu Fu and Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University, and a preprint of the research published from those sequences suggested they came from nose swab samples from outpatients with suspected COVID-19 early in the epidemic.
"There are no corrections to the paper, the paper states human subjects approval was obtained, and the sequencing shows no evidence of plasmid or sample-to-sample contamination. It therefore seems likely the sequences were deleted to obscure their existence."
https://www.livescience.com/deleted-covid-19-gene-sequences-found.html
No comments:
Post a Comment