paper withdrawn and now back in news
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
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871
Covid-19 lab leak theory: ==Indian scientists had flagged ‘unnatural insertions’ in its genome, were forced to withdraw study
Researchers from Kusuma School of Biological Sciences in IIT Delhi had published a paper last year showing that the 4 unique insertions in Novel Coronavirus match with HIV virus==
4 June, 2021
https://www.opindia.com/2021/06/indian-scientists-had-found-unique-insertions-in-covid-19-virus-genome/
"One of such studies that was brought to the notice of Fauci was a research paper by some scientists from India. In January last year, researchers from Kusuma School of Biological Sciences in IIT Delhi and Acharya Narendra Dev College under Delhi University had published a paper, where they had found that the spike glycoprotein (S) of SARS-CoV-2 had four insertions which are not found in any other Coronavirus, and the insertions are similar to those found in HIV virus. The study had raised that possibility that SARS-CoV-2 may have been bio-engineered using the existing Coronavirus and HIV virus.
The research paper, Prashant Pradhan, Ashutosh Kumar Pandey, Akhilesh Mishra, Parul Gupta, Praveen Kumar Tripathi, Manoj Balakrishnan Menon, James Gomes, Perumal Vivekanandan and Bishwajit Kundu, had studied the all the available coronavirus sequences which are available at NCBI viral genome database.
The spike (S) glycoproteins enable the Coronavirus to enter the cells of human bodies. Studies have shown that the glycoprotein has a specific shape that helps them to attach to host cells, and this ability is unique to the SARS-CoV-2, not found in other types of Coronaviruses like SARS-CoV. More specifically, the spike glycoprotein (S) of Coronavirus is cleaved into two subunits, S1 and S2. The S1 helps in binding with the receptor on the target cell, and the S2 subunit facilitates fusion with the cell membrane.
As this splitting of the glycoprotein in SARS-CoV-2 is unique to it, the Indian researchers wanted to study how this evolution happened. To do this study, they compared the spike glycoprotein sequences of the SARS-CoV-2 with SARS-CoV, and analysed the difference in them. On careful examination of the sequence alignment, they found that the SARS-CoV-2 spike glycoprotein contained 4 insertions, or 4 segments that are not found in the earlier less infectious forms of Coronavirus.
The four insertions found in the study are, GTNGTKR, HKNNKS, GDSSSG and QTNSPRRA."
"After finding this, they then studiedall available full-length sequences of the virus found in human bodies, and they found that the insertions were present in all of them. But most importantly, the found thatthese segments were not there in the spike glycoprotein sequence of the same virus found in bats.
When they further analysed these 4 segments to know its possible origin, they found thatall four them match with segments in Human immunodeficiency Virus-1(HIV-1) proteins. The first 3 segments match with segments of amino acid residues in HIV-1 gp120, while the fourth segment matches with HIV-1 Gag. Among the four, the first two are 100% matches, while the rest two have some gaps. These proteins are critical for the viruses to identify and latch on to their host cells and for assembly of new viruses.
According to the researchers,such matches of proteins in both SARS-CoV-2 and HIV-1 viruses can’t be random. They also say that asthe segments were not there in the same virus found in bats or all other forms of Coronavirus, it is very startling, as it is quiteunlikely for a virus to have acquired such unique changes naturally in a short duration of time. It may be noted thatit is claimed that the virus jumped to humans from bats, either directly or through an intermediary animal."