"If SARS-CoV-2 had a laboratory origin, it would have been amplified in a laboratory through a process of serial passage typically needed to recover high-titer stocks from environmental samples. In this process, the deletion of the furin cleavage site is expected, offering a signature of laboratory handling. However, early isolates of SARS-CoV-2 show the furin cleavage site to be intact, arguing against introduction into humans after laboratory cell culture."
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"... laboratory experiments would likely have included the adaptation of a virus in common laboratory animal models such as mice to study it with ease. Thus, a laboratory-derived virus released into the population would reasonably be expected to carry these adaptive markers in their genomes. However, early isolates of SARS-CoV-2 did not carry mutations that confer adaptation to common animal models,"
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"Early cases in Wuhan involved two lineages, distinguishable by the viral genome sequence, suggesting that there were multiple events of spillover into humans. This situation is more likely to have resulted from zoonosis than a lab accident as lab accidents are relatively rare, and both lineages of SARS-CoV-2 were found in sequences from the Hunan market"
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28 March 2023
A Critical Analysis of the Evidence for the SARS-CoV-2 Origin Hypotheses
Authors: James C. Alwine, Arturo Casadevall, Lynn W. Enquist
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9968-8586, Felicia D. Goodrum
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6646-7290 fgoodrum@arizona.edu, Michael J. Imperiale
https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mbio.00583-23