Host genomes for the unique SARS-CoV-2 variant leaked into Antarctic soil metagenomic sequencing data

doi:10.21203/rs.3.rs-1330800/v1

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Research Article

Host genomes for the unique SARS-CoV-2 variant leaked into Antarctic soil metagenomic sequencing data

https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-1330800/v1

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Recently Csabai et al.1 have found a most likely contaminated metagenomic sample set from Antarctica that contained traces of unique SARS-CoV-2 variants. This is a short followup of that report where we attempt to find genetic footprint of the hosts. With reasonable confidence we could identify genetic material from mitochondria of Homo sapiens, green monkey and Chinese hamster. The latter two most probably originated from cell lines Vero E6 (or COS-7) and CHO respectively, which are frequent laboratory culture media for studying viruses including SARS-CoV-2 and its closest relatives.

Molecular Genetics

Bioinformatics

sars-cov-2

covid-19

origin

host genome

Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests.

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