Why scientists think the novel coronavirus developed naturally—not in a Chinese lab.
virus that initially circulated in bats then spilled into humans. But that hasn’t stopped some from trying to find a more sinister origin. “It seems like such an extreme event that people are looking for an extraordinary explanation for it,” said Stephen Goldstein, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Utah who studies coronaviruses. No single piece of evidence has yet confirmed the virus’ origin.
The original SARS coronavirus targeted the same receptors, and after the 2002 SARS epidemic, experiments tinkered with its spike to determine the structure of an “optimized” version of the SARS lock pick. Many factors influence the success of a virus,, so “if you were going to make a new virus, and make it even more infectious than SARS,” said Goldstein, you would give it that optimized tip.
How SARS-CoV-2 acquired this unusual tip is still a mystery. But blaming it on genetic engineering overstates the abilities of scientists, Garry said. Guessing that these particular amino acids can bind to ACE2 so effectively is nearly impossible— there are 20 common types of amino acids, and tens of millions of ways to arrange them into a binding tip.
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