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Thirteen genetic sequences – isolated from people with COVID-19 infections in China at the start of the pandemic – were mysteriously deleted from an online database last year, but have now been recovered.
Computational biologist Jesse Bloom and viral evolution specialist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center have found that the sequences have been removed from an online database at the request of scientists in Wuhan, China. But with a little attention on the Internet, he was able to recover copies of data stored in Google Cloud.
Sequences do not fundamentally change the understanding that scientists have Origin of COVID-19 – among other things, whether the coronavirus has spread naturally from animals to humans or escaped in a laboratory accident. But the deletion raises concerns that the Chinese government’s secrecy has hampered international efforts to understand how COVID-19 was created.
Bloom’s results were published last year a printing paper, still reviewed by other scientists, published on Tuesday. “I think it matches the attempt to hide the sequences,” he told BuzzFeed News.
Bloom later learned of the deleted data reading a paper From a team led by Carlos Farkas at the University of Manitoba in Canada about some of the oldest genetic sequences of SARS-CoV-2. Farkas’s article described sequences taken from outpatient clinics by Wuhan researchers who were developing diagnostic tests for the virus. But when Bloom tried to download the sequences Sequence Read Archive, An online database run by the National Institutes of Health, showing error messages that were removed.
Bloom realized that copies of SRA data were also kept on servers managed by Google, and invented URLs where missing sequences could be found in the cloud. In this way, he recovered 13 genetic sequences that could help answer questions about how the coronavirus evolved and where it originated.
Bloom found that the deleted sequences, like others collected on out-of-town dates, were more similar to bat coronaviruses — they are said to be the last ancestors of the virus that causes COVID-19 — than sequences associated with Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Market. This adds to earlier suggestions that the seafood market may have been a victim of COVID-19 rather than the place where the coronavirus jumped from animals to humans.
“The research by Dr. Bloom is very interesting and I think the analysis is completely correct,” Farkas told BuzzFeed News in an email. Scott Gottliebe, former head of the Food and Drug Administration, also praised the findings on Twitter.
But some scientists were not so surprised. “It really doesn’t add anything to the discussion of origin,” Robert Garry of Tulane University in New Orleans told BuzzFeed News in an email. Garry argued that the Huanan market or other Wuhan markets could still be sources of COVID-19.
Bloom is one of 18 scientists in May has published a letter Criticizing research conducted by the WHO and China on the origin of SARS-CoV-2. The scientists argued that the WHO-China report did not “consider” the idea that the coronavirus spread from animals to people or escaped from the laboratory – the report hit the theory “very unlikely”. Following the publication of the WHO-China report, the US and 13 other governments he complained “lack of access to complete original data and samples.”
The deleted virus sequences were first uploaded to the SRA in early March 2020, at the time by researchers led by Yan Li and Tiangang Liu of Wu Li University. has published prepress Describing the work done using genetic sequencing to diagnose COVID-19. A few days earlier, the Council of State of China he ordered All documents related to COVID-19 must be approved centrally.
Then the sequences came out of the SRA in June, the latest version of the paper appeared in a scientific journal. According to the NIH, the authors requested that the sequences be removed. “The applicant stated that the sequence information was updated, was being sent to another database, and wanted to remove the data from the SRA to avoid version control issues,” NIH spokeswoman Amanda Fine told BuzzFeed News in an email.
However, it is not clear whether the sequences were published online in another database.
“There is no credible scientific reason for the deletion,” Bloom wrote in his prepress, arguing that the sequels were probably deleted “to obscure existence”. This suggested, he wrote, “a heartfelt effort to trace the initial spread of the epidemic.”
Although the sequences were deleted, Garry noted that the key genetic mutations they contained were published in the table in the final paper of the Wuhan group. “Jesse Bloom didn’t find anything new that is no longer part of the scientific literature,” Garry told BuzzFeed News, and accused Bloom of his pre-printing in an “inflammatory and unnecessary way”.
Bloom wrote to Wuhan investigators asking why the sequences were deleted, but received no response. Li and Liu did not immediately respond to the BuzzFeed News consultant.
This is not the first time that scientists have raised concerns about the deletion of data that could help answer questions about the origin of COVID-19. The main database of information on coronavirus sequences maintained by the Wuhan Virology Institute is the focus of speculation about a “laboratory escape” of the virus – has been taken offline September 2019. When they are members of the WHO-China group studied the origin they visited the pandemic institute in February, they told the database he reportedly reported the data 22,000 coronavirus samples and sequence records were removed after repeated hacking attempts.
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