Last week, the investigation into the origins of the Sars Cov-2 coronavirus took a new turn. A French evolutionary biologist discovered a “treasure trove” of genetic sequences recovered from market surfaces in Wuhan, China, shortly after the outbreak of the pandemic.

The researcher and an international team of her colleagues uploaded the data in hopes of understanding who or what might have carried the virus into space. What they found, according to the Atlantic, reinforces the hypothesis that the pandemic was of purely natural origin.: Genetic evidence suggests that live mammals are sold illegally in the Huanan market – among them raccoon dogsa species of fox known to be susceptible to the virus may have carried the coronavirus in late 2019.

But what would otherwise be a simple process of corroborating new evidence quickly turned into a mystery with data gaps. About a day after downloading the sequences from a database called GISAID, the researchers contacted the Chinese scientists who downloaded the data to share some preliminary results.. The next day, access to the sequences was “blocked” – according to GISAID, at the request of Chinese researchers who had previously analyzed the data and reached completely different conclusions.

On the evening of March 20, an international research team that reanalyzed data from the Huanan market published a report of their findings, but did not attach the data on which it was based. The text confirms that genetic material from “raccoon” dogs and various other mammals was found in some places where parts of the SARS-CoV-2 genome were identified, around the same time that the epidemic began.

Mammals and virus in the market