This is a very interesting analysis and seems to show attempts to nudge the trees to a preferred outcome. This reminds me of the attempts by Rambaut et al, to push away RaTG13 as the closest related taxon to SARS2, instead claiming that the BANALs are closer (which happily come from Laos as opposed to S.China in the case of RaTG13). Standard phylogenomic trees show RaTG13 as the sister species to SARS2, confirmed independently by several groups. Rambaut et al had to invent the synthetic recCA outgroup in order to move RaTG13 away from SARS2 on a phylogenetic tree
'Under slower evolution, the Makona strain is a basal, sister lineage, new and unexpected.'
Rambaut took efforts to challenge the slow evolution viewpoint, probably to support the claim that the Makona strain was not a divergent lineage, in the following 2016 Comment:
Yeah, I'm actually unfamiliar with what's been published on this subject after the initial analyses. Maybe I should do a 4th installment to include relevant developments since 2016.
The 'frozen' sequences from the 2021 outbreak are interesting - while there is some persistence of EBOV reported, it shouldn't lead to sequence stasis, and 5 years is a long time to be persistent in an individual.
This is a very interesting analysis and seems to show attempts to nudge the trees to a preferred outcome. This reminds me of the attempts by Rambaut et al, to push away RaTG13 as the closest related taxon to SARS2, instead claiming that the BANALs are closer (which happily come from Laos as opposed to S.China in the case of RaTG13). Standard phylogenomic trees show RaTG13 as the sister species to SARS2, confirmed independently by several groups. Rambaut et al had to invent the synthetic recCA outgroup in order to move RaTG13 away from SARS2 on a phylogenetic tree
'Under slower evolution, the Makona strain is a basal, sister lineage, new and unexpected.'
Rambaut took efforts to challenge the slow evolution viewpoint, probably to support the claim that the Makona strain was not a divergent lineage, in the following 2016 Comment:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaf3823
Yeah, I'm actually unfamiliar with what's been published on this subject after the initial analyses. Maybe I should do a 4th installment to include relevant developments since 2016.
The 'frozen' sequences from the 2021 outbreak are interesting - while there is some persistence of EBOV reported, it shouldn't lead to sequence stasis, and 5 years is a long time to be persistent in an individual.