The mystery of the coronavirus sequences deleted from the databases at the beginning of the pandemic

The debate on the origin of the coronavirus is rekindled after a researcher claims to have found 13 sequences of Sars-Cov-2 on Google Cloud that could help trace the time of the spillover. And that had been deleted

(photo: Getty Images) 241 sequences of the Sars-Cov-2 genome taken from Chinese patients during the early stages of the pandemic have been deleted from the database on which they were recorded. To find out, and to recover 13 of them from Google Cloud backups, was Jesse Bloom, who studies the evolution of viruses at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, who describes his investigation in an article available on bioRxiv, pending review of other scientists. However, what has been revealed does not really seem to support any conspiracy hypothesis, but the sequences found could help in reconstructing the history of the coronavirus.

The investigation

To Bloom that rambling report of the Health Organization (WHO) on the origins of the coronavirus just wasn't enough. Therefore he began to retrace the steps of the commission in search of the first sequences of the Sars-Cov-2 genome.

Thus he came across a Chinese study that reported mutations found in genomic sequences obtained from biological samples taken from Covid-19 patients in China at the start of the pandemic. The sequences, not fully reported in the work, were recorded on the Sequence Read Archive (Sra) database, supervised by a division of the US National Institute of Health (Nih).

Trying to trace the complete sequences directly from the database, however, Bloom realized that they were gone: they had been eliminated. Thanks to further investigations, however, Bloom was able to recover 13, still stored in the cloud backup.

The mystery of the deleted sequences

Why were those sequences removed from the database?

Contacted directly by e-mail, the authors of the Chinese study have not yet responded, but a Nih spokesperson reported that the deletion was requested by the authors (who own the data) because the same sequences were being updated and would then be uploaded to another database.

Bloom, however, reports that he has not yet been able to find them elsewhere, and considers the facts a bit suspicious. Could it have been a cover-up? Not everyone in the scientific community seems to favor this hypothesis: after all, the Chinese article is still available and was for a year before the arrival of the University of Utah virologist Stephen Goldstein in Science Magazine. request to delete sequences from the database. Perhaps, being published in a minor journal, it just escaped scientists' radar.

What the rediscovered sequences tell us

Bloom's discovery doesn't add much to what was already known, or it was suspected, on the origin of the coronavirus, and that is that it is very likely that Sars-Cov-2 (or a very close relative of it) was already circulating in China before December 2019 and that the Wuhan wet market was either not the place of the spillover or it was not the only one (so much so that some of the first cases of Covid-19 had no connections). The sequences found by Bloom, in fact, do not contain three mutations typical of the version of Sars-Cov-2 found in the wet market but have similarities with the genome of the bat coronavirus identified in 2013. Perhaps, therefore, they are sequences belonging to a intermediate link in the evolution of the coronavirus that could help experts uncover its true story.

Putting aside the cover-up hypothesis, Bloom's analysis, although it has yet to be scrutinized by other experts, it seems interesting from a methodological point of view and indicates a direction to follow. We need to plumb the Internet: let the hunt for lost sequences open.


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China Conspiracy Coronavirus Health globalData.fldTopic = "China , Conspiracy, Coronavirus, Health "

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