In the June 2022 issue of Virologica Sinica, researchers at Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) published a paper that said WIV efficiently assembled a large fragment of the monkeypox virus genome for the purpose of developing a PCR test for monkeypox.
This WIV article is not particularly eye-catching at the first glance, but it does raise doubts when one thinks about its objective and approaches.
First, the development of a PCR test is a mature and routine practice in molecular biology and does not require a large fragment of the virus as a template or positive control. Secondly, from a biotechnology point of view, to assemble a large virus genome in the lab is no small feat. These two do not add up–why undergo a difficult endeavor in synthetic biology just to accomplish a simple goal?…