[lamontcg]

Another good twitter thread on it this morning:

https://twitter.com/acritschristoph/status/15834864034169692...

This is the real kicker to me:

> What about missing sites? The authors propose that someone made a bizarre combination of additions and deletions of cut sites. RecCA matches SARS-CoV-2 at all missing sites because other viruses do. E.g. this one: similar to RpYN06 not just at the mutation, but the entire region.

Clear evidence of recombination across the whole region and not just mutations to manipulate the cut site.

And Francois Balloux seems to have deleted his twitter account this morning.

[tripletao]

As far as I can tell, WIV (and other) researchers have left other restriction sites in final genomes, but not BsaI and BsmBI sites. That makes sense given the typical use of those two enzymes. So I'm inclined to agree there's nothing obviously special about that combination of restriction sites and spacings, which increases my concern that this is just a false discovery.

Jesse Bloom said he'd try reproducing with a wider range of natural viruses and potential synthetic assembly strategies. Unless and until that still gets an interesting p value, I'd agree this is oversold.