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Lab-Origin Hypothesis of COVID-19 Examined

🧵 The TL;DR

Researchers developed a straightforward approach to examine the lab-origin hypothesis of the COVID-19 pandemic, involving aligning genome sequences, deriving a consensus sequence, and recovering infectious virus. This process resulted in a chimeric virus and successful infection of mice, providing evidence to support the hypothesis.

    🔑 Key Points

  • Pandemic caused by bat SARS-like coronavirus emerged in Wuhan, 1000 km from nearest wild bats with SARS-CoV-2 like coronaviruses, containing labs conducting world's largest research program on bat SARS-like coronaviruses.
  • Researchers aligned genome sequences of several bat SARS-related CoV sequences, derived a consensus sequence, and synthesized cDNA to recover an infectious virus containing fragments of both SARS-CoV and Bat-SCoV.
  • This process successfully infected mice engineered to express human receptors on their airway cells, providing evidence to support the lab-origin hypothesis.

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