Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally

Re:Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spr... by gravelc on Friday January 31, 2020 @04:34PM (#22206034)

This is laughable.

Table 1 shows four alignments. The first two are only six contiguous residues, so can easily happen by chance. Three has multiple mistmatches as well as the gap (red). Four has an even larger gap to get the alignment.

Take any two viruses and there's a decent likelihood of finding similar alignments.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spr... by KaoruAoiShiho on Friday January 31, 2020 @04:55PM (#22206252)

Thanks honestly reassuring.

- Some layman.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spr... by dylz on Friday January 31, 2020 @05:53PM (#22206775)

They don't appear to even be matching entire sequences. An analogy might be "these two web pages both contain <div>*</div>! oh no!" while completely disregarding everything in the middle.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spr... by KaoruAoiShiho on Friday January 31, 2020 @06:24PM (#22207033)

If it's as bad as it sounds, would this be a neophyte mistake or deliberate conspiracy mongering?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spr... by dylz on Friday January 31, 2020 @06:36PM (#22207121)

I don't know, nor am I in a position to really have an opinion on this, but it might even be as small of a reason as "hey I want to get published"

The PDF itself is MS Word, has numerous typos/little care (words like 'alingment'), random font changes back and forth between Times New Roman and the default MS Word font (Calibri?))

For HIV related fearmongering about "well, why would they know to treat it with HIV meds??", people are looking at this already because previous SARS-CoV has previous investigation with HIV medication, it is not unique to nCOV: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14985565, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15144898, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14519691 - these are from 2003-2006.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spr... by dekhn on Friday January 31, 2020 @06:31PM (#22207086)

Based on my read, it's inexperienced bioinformaticists.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spr... by randall on Friday January 31, 2020 @07:22PM (#22207422)

That makes the first thing sound like treknobabble.

[ Parent | on HN ]