[yters]

Hmm, still not following. Why would the fact both are betacoronaviruses entail ace2 is conserved? Is human binding ace2 a common feature of betacoronaviruses? Are you arguing that sars is the more recent ancestor than ratg13?

I blasted sars2 against sars and against ratg13. 88% coverage for the first and 99% for the second, so ratg13 seems to be a much more recent ancestor.

- sars2 v. sars: https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi?CMD=Get&RID=D7WE9PB...

- sars2 v. ratg13: https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi?CMD=Get&RID=D7WGNJG...

Why would ace2 be much better preserved between sars2 and sars than between sars2 and ratg13?

Apologies for being dense :) As you notice, I'm pretty new to bioinformatics. Just trying to understand what your argument is.

UPDATE: Sorry, I see a mistake I've been making that is confusing. I should be referring to Bat_CoV_ZC45 and Bat_CoV_ZXC21, not ratg13. ratg13 is the one that also has a close match to ace2, but the author claims is a forgery. The bat coronaviruses also seem to be more evolutionarily close to sars2 than sars, and they don't have the ace2 binding sites.

[DiogenesKynikos]

> Why would the fact both are betacoronaviruses entail ace2 is conserved? Is human binding ace2 a common feature of betacoronaviruses? Are you arguing that sars is the more recent ancestor than ratg13?

I'm saying that it's complete nonsense to say that there's a (1/20)^7 chance of 7 amino acids matching. We're talking about viruses that are descended from a common ancestor, not random, independently distributed coin flips.

> ratg13 seems to be a much more recent ancestor.

RaTG13 is not an ancestor of SARS-CoV-2. The two viruses share a common ancestor.

> Why would ace2 be much better preserved between sars2 and sars than between sars2 and ratg13?

ACE2 is a human protein. Neither SARS-CoV-2 nor SARS-CoV have ACE2. If you're talking about the RBD of the S protein, then note that the RBDs of SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV are only 73% homologous, which is a pretty massive difference.

Stepping back for a second, you're diving down the conspiracy-theory rabbit hole with very little prior knowledge of the subject. That's just going to make you easy prey to a lot of nonsense. Really, instead of reading blogs that claim to have found the secret truth about SARS-CoV-2, listen to what respected virologists have to say about it. Do some basic background reading on virology and coronaviruses. Read some review articles from scientific journals.

[yters]

I've done a bit of reading from the experts. I read the main debunking article about this lab theory, and personally did not really understand why the authors were so confident their evidence eliminated the lab theory.

- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9

Their two claims are:

1) ace2 binding is much better than humans can engineer with computer simulations

2) virus does not come from any known backbones

Regarding #1, I've found another article where the author was able to induce zoonosis from a feline coronavirus to a mouse by exposing the virus to mouse genetic material. So, the fact humans cannot directly engineer zoonosis very well does not preclude lab induced zoonosis.

- https://www.nature.com/articles/news030331-4

In fact, this is a theory posited at the end of another debunking article, which doesn't actually debunk that particular theory.

- https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-wuhan-lab-complicate...

Regarding #2, as I mentioned before, it seems this line of reasoning is a non sequitur. A virus backbone used to create a bioweapon is exactly the sort of sequence you are not going to upload to NCBI.

The fact the reasoning does not seem very solid in what is considered the official and definitive debunking of the conspiracy theory is itself odd.

So, it is my reading of some respected virologists that in part motivates me down this rabbit hole.

Anyways, I greatly appreciate your feedback. I'll keep learning more about virology, and hopefully get some clarity on the whole matter.

[DiogenesKynikos]

The WIV is not a bioweapons laboratory. It's an academic research institution. Any gain-of-function experiments they would do would be aimed at understanding viruses, not creating weapons. They would use known backbones, not a virus nobody has ever heard of, that they've never even uploaded to a database.

I'm going to suggest to you that the reason you don't find the reasoning in the debunking to be solid is that you don't understand the field very well. I don't know what your specialty is, but imagine someone who has no experience in it. They might have a lot of weird conceptions about your specialty, they might have no idea how things work in your field, they might find a lot of things surprising. Things that you find obvious might seem dubious to a novice. The arguments made in the debunking are considered very strong by experts in the field. That's what matters.

[yters]

Yes, that is a fair point. I just wish the experts were better communicators to us lay people.