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A Ph.D in biology familiar to the authors at VladTepesBlog, took the time and effort to really look at some of the available documents on the nature of the Wuhan strains of the Corona virus now shutting down the world.
There are a number of anomalies that differentiate it from all other strains of Corona which deserve a closer look. One of which, and one of several, is the insertion of segments of the HIV virus which is not found in any other strain of Corona anywhere. But there is much more to cause concern and raise suspicion that this is really a WMD bioweapon from the Communist Chinese government.
Below, the executive summary of this Dr.’s investigation.
A summary of some of the research papers used to write this summary can be downloaded here.
could SARS CoV-2 be a bioweapon?
Dr. Anon Ph.D.
On January 31st, Indian scientists (Pradhan et al.) posted on a research website a not-yet-peer-reviewed paper called “Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag.” They looked at the genomes of all of the versions of the new coronavirus now known as SARS CoV-2 that were available at the time (there were 28) and also the genomes of all coronaviruses whose genome sequences were published in databases (there were 55). The different versions of the SARS CoV-2 virus differ in generally less than a dozen nucleic acids in its approximately 30,000-nucleic acid genome. Such mutations are typical of viruses. Pradhan et al. found the most closely related virus to be the SARS CoV virus that caused the 2002-03 pandemic.
They then also closely compared the spike protein of the new virus with that of SARS CoV and generated a three-dimensional structure of the spike protein of the new virus. They found that all 28 strains of the new virus contained four insertions of amino acids that were not present in SARS CoV. They named the insertions insertion 1, 2, 3, and 4. They also looked for the insertions in all of the other 55 coronaviruses and did not find them. One other group (Zhou et al.) had reported three insertions but those authors had not looked at the entire sequence of the spike protein.
Looking for where the insertions might have come from, Pradhan et al. used the nucleic acid sequence of each insert as a “query” of all available viral sequences found in databases. They found that each of the four inserts aligned with short segments of the HIV-1 virus. Inserts 1, 2, and 3 aligned with parts of the HIV-1 gp120 protein and insert 4 aligned with a short segment of the HIV-1 Gag protein. Inserts 1 and 2 were both six amino acids long had 100% sequence homology with the corresponding segments in HIV. Insert 3 was twelve amino acids long and aligned with a 15-amino acid segment in gp120 if one left a 3-amino acid gap in insert 3. Insert 4 was eight amino acids long and aligned with a sequence in the HIV Gag protein if one left a gap of 11 amino acids between the first four and the last four amino acids in the coronavirus sequence. [Using the one-letter abbreviationsfor amino acids, the amino acid sequence of insert 4 is QTNSPRRA, and is located in positions 677 to 684 of the spike protein.]
The authors thought it was unusual to find short stretches of amino acids in unrelated proteins and expressed the opinion that it was unlikely the inserts were there by chance. When they modelled the structure based on the available structure of the SARS CoV spike protein they found that the first three inserts folded together to constitute part of the binding site that recognizes the host receptor. Insert 4 was located at the junction of the S1 and S2 subunits of the spike protein. (When the virus binds to the host cell, its spike protein S is cleaved by proteases on the host cell into subunits S1 and S2. S1 is needed for binding to the receptor and S2 is involved in fusing the virus membrane with the cell membrane.)
Pradhan et al. also thought that the insertions would provide additional flexibility to the glycoprotein binding site by forming a hydrophilic loop that may facilitate or enhance virus-host interactions. (The spike protein is a glycoprotein, meaning there are sugar groups attached to it.)
Pradhan et al. (2020) withdrew their paper within days of prepublication after it was criticized for methodological reasons.
