(Newswire.net — April 5, 2020) — Along with the spread of the COVID-19 strain, misinformation is also spreading like a virus. One of the most persistent myths today is that this coronavirus type was made by scientists and that it “escaped” from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, where the epidemic began.
A new analysis of SARS-CoV-2 may finally refute this myth.
A group of researchers has compared the genome of this new coronavirus strain with six other coronaviruses known to infect humans: SARS, MERS, and SARS-CoV-2, which can cause serious illness; along with HKU1, NL63, OC43, and 229E, which usually cause mild symptoms, the researchers wrote on March 17 in the Nature Medicine journal.
“Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a deliberately modified virus,” the study authors wrote in a journal article.
Professor Kristian Andersen, Director of Infectious Disease Genomics at Scripps Research Translational Institute in California – Department of Immunology and Microbiology along with his colleagues examined the genetic pattern of spike proteins protruding from the surface of the virus. The virus uses these spikes to grasp the outer walls of a host cell and then enter.
Scientists found that these spikes evolved to target human cell receptors called ACE2. It is so effective in binding to human cells that researchers have said that spike proteins are the result of natural selection rather than genetic engineering.
Here’s why: SARS-CoV-2 is very similar to the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) virus, which spread around the globe almost 20 years ago. Scientists have studied how SARS-CoV differs from SARS-CoV-2 – with several key differences in the genetic code. Still, in computer simulations, mutations in SARS-CoV-2 do not seem to work very well in helping the virus bind to human cells. Had scientists deliberately constructed this virus, they would not have chosen the mutations that computer models assumed would not work. But it turns out that nature is smarter than scientists, and the new coronavirus has found a way to mutate in a more efficient – and completely different – manner than anything scientists could think to create, the study found.
Two years before the outbreak of the deadly coronavirus, scientists spoke of their fears about a new laboratory being built to study some of the world’s most dangerous viruses. Coincidently, the laboratory was built in Wuhan, the city at the heart of the outbreak of the new strain of the corona virus, which has so far infected more than a million people in the World.