Yes, SARS-CoV-2 has horseshoe bat coronavirus homologs. The closest-related ones have been found in China, Laos and Cambodia but trying to put together phylogenetic trees with limited data means it could be from any number of similar bat coronaviruses.
What is most notably against the idea of lab engineering is the ACE2-binding moieties and their genomic determinants. This would not be something engineered from scratch via bespoke design, it would require shotgun-ie strategies like serial passage, but the genome itself suggests otherwise: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095063/
It's also important to note that scarless recombinant DNA techniques are ubiquitous and that any argument about the possibility of stitching together bat coronavirus DNA with something else applied to basically any lab working with coronaviruses - including imperialist lab-leak theories about the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Finally, consider that we already had SARS and then MERS. Your hypothesis has to be better than the null one, which has to be the animal reservoir hypothesis - something that keeps happening over and over again and about which many scientific papers have been warning us for years and years. Coronaviruses have a lot of animal hosts and jump between them frequently, posing a continual danger
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Yes, SARS-CoV-2 has horseshoe bat coronavirus homologs. The closest-related ones have been found in China, Laos and Cambodia but trying to put together phylogenetic trees with limited data means it could be from any number of similar bat coronaviruses.
What is most notably against the idea of lab engineering is the ACE2-binding moieties and their genomic determinants. This would not be something engineered from scratch via bespoke design, it would require shotgun-ie strategies like serial passage, but the genome itself suggests otherwise: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095063/
It's also important to note that scarless recombinant DNA techniques are ubiquitous and that any argument about the possibility of stitching together bat coronavirus DNA with something else applied to basically any lab working with coronaviruses - including imperialist lab-leak theories about the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Finally, consider that we already had SARS and then MERS. Your hypothesis has to be better than the null one, which has to be the animal reservoir hypothesis - something that keeps happening over and over again and about which many scientific papers have been warning us for years and years. Coronaviruses have a lot of animal hosts and jump between them frequently, posing a continual danger
deleted by creator