Scrutinizing the extraordinary mosaic evolution of SARS-like coronaviruses

Papers and sequences published by Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) are fundamental to our understanding of zoonotic SARS-like bat coronaviruses, the presumed ancestors of both SARS and SARS-CoV-2. The seminal paper that is “Isolation and characterization of a bat SARS-like coronavirus that uses the ACE2 receptor” (Ge et al, 2013) and the viral sequences Rs3367, RsSHC014 and WIV1 published to GenBank in November, 2013[i]. This, and subsequent papers from WIV, make explicit and implicit claims in relation to the evolution of SARS which contradict a widely accepted model of recombination in single-stranded RNA viruses. Most startlingly, an imputable recombination between ancestors of Rs3367 and RsSHC014 occurs precisely at a breakpoint previously identified by WIV experimentally as optimal, and chosen by another group in an experiment to create a synthetic chimera. Another implied recombination involves the natural insertion of a novel gene, ORFX, into an otherwise undisturbed backbone sequence. WIV’s work purports to show evidence of natural evolutionary mechanisms that may cause rapid species and/or tissue tropism changes, or gain of function via acquisition of a novel gene as an insert. It is important that these results be independently verified.