A major obstacle to finding the origin of Sars-CoV-2 or the coronavirus is due to the lack of access to information from China. In fact, China is where the first outbreak of COVID-19 cases occurred in the world.
Now, a researcher in Seattle has unearthed files deleted from Google Cloud that reveal 13 partial genetic sequences for some of the early cases of COVID-19 in Wuhan, Carl Zimmer reports for The New York Times.
Launching Science Alert, Jesse Bloom of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Seattle has discovered the deleted sequence. Bloom was the lead author of a letter published in May in the journal Science urging unbiased research into the origins of the coronavirus. From this new data, Bloom found that there are indications that the virus was circulating in Wuhan before it appeared in the seafood market.
"They are three steps more similar to the bat coronavirus than the virus from the Huanan fish market," Bloom told The New York Times.
"This fact shows that the market sequence, which was the main focus of genomic epidemiology in the joint WHO-China report ... does not represent the virus circulating in Wuhan in late December 2019 and early January 2020," Bloom wrote in his paper uploaded June 22 to the database data. bioRxiv precast.
According to Zimmer, about a year ago, 241 genetic sequences from coronavirus patients disappeared from an online database called the Sequence Read Archive run by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Bloom first noticed the missing sequence when he came across the spreadsheet in a study published in May 2020 in the journal PeerJ. There, the authors listed 241 SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequences as of the end of March 2020. The sequences were part of a Wuhan University project named PRJNA612766 and were allegedly uploaded to the Sequence Read Archive.
When he searches the archive database for the order, he gets a 'No item found' response. Bloom was unable to find an explanation as to why the sequence was removed, and his emails to the two authors concerned to inquire did not receive a response.
"There is no plausible scientific reason for the deletion: the sequence closely matches the sample described in Wang et al. (2020a, b)," argued Bloom in bioRxiv.
"There is no correction to the paper, the paper states that the consent of the human subject has been obtained, and the sequencing shows no evidence of plasmids or sample-to-sample contamination. Therefore, it appears that the sequence was deleted to obscure its existence," he said seriously.
However, Bloom notes several limitations in his research, notably that the sequence is partial and does not include information to provide a clear date or place of collection - information essential to tracing the virus back to its origin.
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