@swcrisis The importance of the FCS has been known for many years and Chinese scientists were toying with it.

Here is a GoF work from a Beijing team, published in Oct 2019, with point mutation of a chicken coronavirus to get a working FCS.

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/artic…

@swcrisis They changed PRGR in rYN just before the S2 subsite to RRKR, to make it an FCS (R-X-KorR-R is the canonical FCS motif).

This increased the viral load by x10 after 36 hours. Survival of 1-day-old chickens went from 90% to 10%.

@swcrisis According to the paper, they were inspired by similar work on SARS-CoV

@swcrisis Here is a good summary of the FCS motif, across many organisms:

@swcrisis By the way the reference for the creation of a SARS-CoV FCS with motif RRKR in the Beijing paper from Oct 2019 is wrong.

[21] points to something different.
The likely reference is Watanabe et al, Dec 2008:
journals.asm.org/doi/full/10.11…

@swcrisis Many thanks to @Daoyu15 for finding the right reference paper.

@swcrisis @Daoyu15 @threadreaderapp unroll