Evidence suggests the Rocky Mountain Laboratory had access to the SARS-CoV-2 genome before the rest of the world On January 22, 2020, Dr. Vincent Munsey’s laboratory at the Rocky Mountain Laboratory (RML) published a pre-print manuscript containing a set of highly complex experiments using synthetic spike proteins from SARS-CoV-2. This is, to my knowledge, the first publication of synthetic biology work being done using the genome sequence of the Spike Protein of SARS-CoV-2. An analysis of the timeline and workflow from this first manuscript, starting from the publicly stated date when the first genome was available, concludes that the experiments could not have been done that quickly. The alternative hypothesis is that RML had the sequences before their publication from China. The implications of this conclusion are immense.
@quay_dr Is the pre-print still available? The Methods section might be informative. They probably didn't make these themselves.
@quay_dr Even if they produced the proteins they most likely did not make the plasmids.
@ZooNaughty @quay_dr Looks like this one : biorxiv.org/content/10.110…
@ZooNaughty @quay_dr I haven't looked that closely, but I sense that this is a false alarm. It looks like they only looked at the SC2 RBD within an established research framework. (Lineage B does NOT refer to the A/B lineages of early SC2)