Index Entries

John Leake
October 28, 2022
Courageous Discourse

“On February 21, 2022, Frontiers in Virology published a report titled MSH3 Homology and Potential Recombination Link to SARS-CoV-2 Furin Cleavage Site. The Furin Cleavage Site is the component of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein that enables the virus to dock onto human lung epithelial cells, thereby initiating the viral replication process. It is the key feature of SARS-CoV-2 that made it infectious to humans. Examining the genetic code of this part of the spike protein, the authors noted that part of the sequence was a perfect match to a genetic sequence patented in 2016 by Bancel S. et al. in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

SARS-CoV-2 Spike Protein and MSH3

A peculiar feature of the nucleotide sequence encoding the PRRA furin cleavage site in the SARS-CoV-2 S protein is its two consecutive CGG codons. This arginine codon is rare in coronaviruses: relative synonymous codon usage (RSCU) of CGG in pangolin CoV is 0, in bat CoV 0.08, in SARS-CoV 0.19, in MERS-CoV 0.25, and in SARS-CoV-2 0.299 (8).

A BLAST search for the 12-nucleotide insertion led us to a 100% reverse match in a proprietary sequence (SEQ ID11652, nt 2751-2733) found in the US patent 9,587,003 filed on Feb. 4, 2016 (9)

On the question of whether this perfect match could be merely coincidental, the authors noted:

Conventional biostatistical analysis indicates that the probability of this sequence randomly being present in a 30,000-nucleotide viral genome is 3.21×10^-11."

 

 

document
COVID-19,pathogen origin,mRNA,SARS-CoV-2 spike protein