An article was published in Natural Medicine in 2015. In the article, the authors produced a hybrid coronavirus, a chimeric virus with RsSHC014-CoV sequence backbone isolated from Chinese horseshoe bat 1 and zoonotic CoV spike protein. The authors merged 6 viral DNA fragments together by enzymatic methods. Based on the method used in the article, it is possible to accurately predict the DNA base pairs in the junctions connecting viral fragments. DNA sequence aligment of these junction DNA sequences and the DNA sequences of the Wuhan pathogenic coronavirus (recently released by China, Jan 14/24, 2020) indicates that all the linker DNA of the synthetic virus was present in the Wuhan pathogenic coronavirus DNA.
The natural occuring probability of 7-mer sequences is about 16,000 bases, so this may still be a natural event, but it is an interesting coincidence. Hope someone has the resources to do further sequence comparisons (nucleotieds and protein sequences).
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