from the attached Scientific American article...
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Does the virus have features that suggest it was created in a lab?
Several researchers have looked into whether features of SARS-CoV-2 signal that it was bioengineered. One of the first teams to do so, led by Kristian Andersen, a virologist at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California, determined that this was “improbable” for a few reasons, including a lack of signatures of genetic manipulation. Since then, others have asked whether the virus’s furin cleavage site—a feature that helps it to enter cells—is evidence of engineering, because SARS-CoV-2 has these sites but its closest relatives don’t. The furin cleavage site is important because it's in the virus's spike protein, and cleavage of the protein at that site is necessary for the virus to infect cells.
But many other coronaviruses have furin cleavage sites, such as coronaviruses that cause colds. Because viruses containing the site are scattered across the coronavirus family tree, rather than confined to a group of closely related viruses, Stephen Goldstein, a virologist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, says the site probably evolved multiple times because it provides an evolutionary advantage. Convergent evolution—the process by which organisms that aren’t closely related independently evolve similar traits as a result of adapting to similar environments—is incredibly common.
Another feature of SARS-CoV-2 that has drawn attention is a combination of nucleotides that underlie a segment of the furin cleavage site: CGG (these encode the amino acid arginine). A Medium article that speculates on a lab origin for SARS-CoV-2 quotes David Baltimore, a Nobel laureate and professor emeritus at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, as saying that viruses don’t usually have that particular code for arginine, but humans often do—a “smoking gun”, hinting that researchers might have tampered with SARS-CoV-2’s genome.
Andersen says that Baltimore was incorrect about that detail, however. In SARS-CoV-2, about 3% of the nucleotides encoding arginine are CGG, he says. And he points out that around 5% of those encoding arginine in the virus that caused the original SARS epidemic are CGG, too. In an e-mail to Nature, BALTIMORE SAYS THAT ANDERSON OOULD BE CORRECT THAT EVOLUTION PRODUCED SARS-COV-2, but adds that “there are other possibilities and they need careful consideration, which is all I meant to be saying”. (emphasis mine)
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Dr. Fauci doesn't lie...but others who don't understand science of Microbiology and Virology do...the best anyone can say for those two chuckle heads, is that they are good at making gullible viewers buy their misinformation.
Link: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-covid-lab-leak-hypothesis-what-scientists-do-and-do-not-know1/