Concerns over the origin of COVID-19 took a strange turn on Monday after a study in the Frontiers in Virology journal revealed scientists found a small pattern of genetic material in COVID-19's spike protein patented by Moderna in February 2016.
The pattern was discovered in SARS-CoV-2's unique furin cleavage site, the area of the virus responsible for rapid infection rates, according to the Daily Mail.
The international team of researchers asserted that there is a 1 in 3 trillion chance Moderna's sequence randomly appeared through natural evolution and suggested the virus may have mutated to form the pattern during experiments on human cells in a lab.
Some, however, are casting doubt on how rare the pattern could be.
Dr. Balamurali Ambati, a member of the team from the University of Oregon, alternatively theorized the pattern might have been introduced by infected human cells expressing the MSH3 gene.
Professor Lawrence Young, a virologist at Warwick University, acknowledged to the Mail that the finding was "quirky" but said it was not significant enough to indicate lab manipulation.
"We're talking about a very, very, very small piece made up of 19 nucleotides," Young said. "So, it doesn't mean very much, to be frank. If you do these types of searches, you can always find matches."
"It doesn't get us any further with the debate about whether Covid was engineered," he added.
Dr. Simon Clarke, a microbiologist at Reading University, also questioned the pattern's rarity to the outlet.
"It's an interesting coincidence, but this is surely entirely coincidental," he said, noting that the number of genetic combinations in the furin cleavage site is limited.
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