SARS-CoV-2 Spike Protein and MSH3
A peculiar feature of the nucleotide sequence encoding the PRRA furin cleavage site in the SARS-CoV-2 S protein is its two consecutive CGG codons. This arginine codon is rare in coronaviruses: relative synonymous codon usage (RSCU) of CGG in pangolin CoV is 0, in bat CoV 0.08, in SARS-CoV 0.19, in MERS-CoV 0.25, and in SARS-CoV-2 0.299 (8).
A BLAST search for the 12-nucleotide insertion led us to a 100% reverse match in a proprietary sequence (SEQ ID11652, nt 2751-2733) found in the US patent 9,587,003 filed on Feb. 4, 2016... This is very rare in the NCBI BLAST database.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles...834808/full#F1
Which leads to:
Quote:
U.S. patent number 9,587,003 [Application Number 15/015,684] was granted by the patent office on 2017-03-07 for modified polynucleotides for the production of oncology-related proteins and peptides. This patent grant is currently assigned to ModernaTX, Inc.. The grantee listed for this patent is Moderna Therapeutics, Inc.. Invention is credited to Stephane Bancel, Tirtha Chakraborty, Antonin de Fougerolles, Kenechi Ejebe, Sayda M. Elbashir, Jeff Lynn Ellsworth, Justin Guild, Paul Hatala, Matthias John, Atanu Roy, Jason P. Schrum, Susan Whoriskey, Kristy M. Wood.
https://uspto.report/patent/grant/9,587,003