>>10662795 (pb) More tampering of virus papers

This was released in January 2020. I remember chasing this down then and there were at least 4 other papers posted in "Pre-review" sites. They were blasted at the time for being posted before they had been vetted, even though the site was were the vetting was supposed to occur.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871v1

Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag

Prashant Pradhan, Ashutosh Kumar Pandey, Akhilesh Mishra, Parul Gupta, Praveen Kumar Tripathi, Manoj Balakrishnan Menon, James Gomes, Perumal Vivekanandan, Bishwajit Kundu

Abstract

We are currently witnessing a major epidemic caused by the 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV). The evolution of 2019-nCoV remains elusive. We found 4 insertions in the spike glycoprotein (S) which are unique to the 2019-nCoV and are not present in other coronaviruses. Importantly, amino acid residues in all the 4 inserts have identity or similarity to those in the HIV-1 gp120 or HIV-1 Gag. Interestingly, despite the inserts being discontinuous on the primary amino acid sequence, 3D-modelling of the 2019-nCoV suggests that they converge to constitute the receptor binding site. The finding of 4 unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV, all of which have identity /similarity to amino acid residues in key structural proteins of HIV-1 is unlikely to be fortuitous in nature. This work provides yet unknown insights on 2019-nCoV and sheds light on the evolution and pathogenicity of this virus with important implications for diagnosis of this virus.