How to BLAST your way to the truth about the origins of COVID-19

I’ve been meaning to write this blog for ever. Well, at least since Prashant Pradhan (a wonderful, honest and brave genomics scientist) raised the possibility back in February 2020 that the SARS-Cov2 virus was man made. And we have seen multiple confirmatory pieces that the virus was made in a lab, one of the better ones here on zenodo and with its own cute video for non-Bayesian peeps here. As of writing this those links are still up which at 12 months is pretty good going for any article that dares challenge the drivel propagandised by our beloved “free press [sponsored by pharma]”.

Anyway, BLAST is the NCBI/NIH (aka US government) repository for genomic and proteomic sequences, amongst other things. It is where all genome scientists around the world deposit their sequences if they make a discovery. Its main function is to allow comparison of gene sequences and discovery of sequences that match one that you might have come across in your experiment. What’s a gene sequence? That’s easy. It’s a line of code, made up of any combination of 4 letters in a sequence. Remember the film GATTACA? If you haven’t watched it by now, you should - because it’s yet another dystopian movie that is now too close to home.

The movie’s title is based on the 4 nucleotide bases (G, A, T, C) which make up the genetic code of every human’s DNA. There are about 3 billion of them in each cell, making a code that is unique - resulting in you, a unique individual! The code pairs up so that G-C and A-T always combine to make the double-helix that you see in the picture, such that GATTACA would be paired with CTAATGT (the complement). The code is read in a specific direction so GATTACA on one strand would be TGTAATC on the other (the reverse complement). One of the good things about BLAST is that it doesn’t care which version you give it, it will still point you to the correct gene.

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