March 25, 2023
"DIDN'T JUST SAY, 'WOW!'":
"The Results on My Screen Were: Raccoon Dog, Raccoon Dog, Raccoon Dog!": Evolutionary biologist Florence Débarre has long been searching for gene sequences from the market in Wuhan. Recently, she made an astounding discovery. What does it tell us about the origins of the coronavirus and the resulting pandemic? (Interview Conducted by Rafaela von Bredow und Veronika Hackenbroch, 25.03.2023, der Spiegel)
DER SPIEGEL: What were you specifically looking for?Débarre: I was looking for information on a gene sequence that had been shared before and was from the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan. You have two ways of accessing a sequence. If you know the identifier, you just enter the identifier, but I was too lazy to look for the identifier, so I just used the search function. I just entered something like "sequences from China. January 2020. Environmental." And there were more sequences than usual. I thought: Wow!DER SPIEGEL: Did you immediately realize what you had found?Débarre: The results are displayed in a table, and you have a column for sequence length. And in the sequence length field, a very short sequences was entered, only three nucleotides. It made no sense. I thought they were placeholders and that the data hadn't been entered yet.DER SPIEGEL: As you and your co-authors write in the recently released report, this happened on March 4. But you only found the actual data five days later?Débarre: I immediately contacted the people who became my co-authors - as well as multiple other researchers - and asked them about the placeholders. They were surprised, but not much more. I, however, really wanted to know what was going on. Then, on March 9, I went back to the database and just clicked on one of the entries - and I realized that there was data associated with them!DER SPIEGEL: Gene sequences from samples taken by Chinese researchers in the Huanan market shortly after the outbreak of the pandemic -- samples containing the SARS-CoV-2 virus. What went through your mind when you found them?Débarre: It was 11:30 p.m. and I was at home on my couch. It was: Wow! I had been waiting for a year, and then suddenly seeing them. But the greatest emotion was the next day ...DER SPIEGEL: What happened then?Débarre: My co-authors started downloading the data and my colleague, Alex Crits-Christoph started analyzing it, focusing first on samples that he found particularly interesting. He sent us a file the next day, a sequence he had assembled from one of the samples. He didn't tell us what it was, to give us the pleasure of seeing it for ourselves. I entered it into a program we use to identify sequences, and the result was: raccoon dog, raccoon dog, raccoon dog! So I don't swear, but I didn't just say "wow!"
Posted by Orrin Judd at March 25, 2023 8:08 AM