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Abstract:
We are currently witnessing a major epidemic caused by the 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-
nCoV). The evolution of 2019-nCoV remains elusive. We found 4 insertions in the spike
glycoprotein (S) which are unique to the 2019-nCoV and are not present in other coronaviruses.
Importantly, amino acid residues in all the 4 inserts have identity or similarity to those in the HIV1 gp120 or HIV-1 Gag. Interestingly, despite the inserts being discontinuous on the primary
amino acid sequence, 3D-modelling of the 2019-nCoV suggests that they converge to constitute
the receptor binding site. The finding of 4 unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV, all of which have
identity /similarity to amino acid residues in key structural proteins of HIV-1 is unlikely to be
fortuitous in nature. This work provides yet unknown insights on 2019-nCoV and sheds light on
the evolution and pathogenicity of this virus with important implications for diagnosis of this virus.

Possibility that HIV virus is in Corona virus, intentional, man made
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871v1.full.pdf

I asked my son, who has a PHD in Microbiology (focus on genetic engineering) about the idea that this is a man-made virus. this is his response:

Dad,

Long story short: This is outside my wheelhouse, but what I see doesn’t convince me of much.

The relevant publication (at-least one of them) might be: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871v1.full.pdf

The paper claims that there are a few dozen genomic sequences from the current virus on NCBI: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/

Indeed, such files are available: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genome/genomes/86693?

I pulled all of the spike glycoprotein sequences:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/protein/QHN73795.1
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/protein/QHN73810.1
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/protein/QHO60594.1
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/protein/QHO62877.1
They all appeared to be identical.

I used a portion of the protein sequence in a ProteinBlast (https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi?PAGE=Proteins), which indicated that it was closely related to other known coronaviruses (e.g. SARS, and a bat coronavirus).

I then retrieved one version of the HIV GAG sequence (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/protein/AAD39400.1), and attempted to align it with each of the spike glycoprotein sequences with SIM Align (https://web.expasy.org/sim/). This allignement didn’t show an impressive degree of similarity.

I tried the same thing with GP120 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/protein/NP_579894.2), which was similarly unimpressive.

I’m not sure how much similarity we’re expecting, but there are only a few residues in a row that are ever identical. The degree of similarity may be a fluke, or it may be statistically significant, but it’s far from the case that 2019-nCoV has been convincingly spliced together from HIV.

It might be more-impressive if there was overlap in the DNA sequences of 2019-nCoV and HIV. So, I pulled the actual genomic sequence for both an ran another allignment, this time with Clustal Omega. The results may be available here: https://www.ebi.ac.uk/Tools/services/web/toolresult.ebi?jobId=clustalo-I20200131-215248-0865-94258030-p2m

That actually shows some more -interesting stuff... HIV is a lot smaller than 2019-nCoV, so most of the genomes don’t overlap. The program is able to generate some weak overlap for virtually all of the HIV genome, but there’s a 1-in-4 that any given base pair can be matched, so that’s not a surprise. The odd thing is that there are some portions of the HIV genome that fail to allign at all to 2019-nCoV. It’s probably just a statistical anomaly.

If someone wanted to make some sort of hybrid HIV/Coronavirus, they went to great pains to make it subtle in 2019-nCoV.