The folks I follow on twitter were getting thrilled to use this as a teaching opportunity for statistics, false discovery rates, and BLAST e-values a couple of days ago.
Completely agree with everything the guy in the link ixtap posted said. It's complete nonsense, several of the sequences posted aren't actually inserts at all but alignment artifacts, and the places where there are insertions they are
1) the sort of small insertions and deletions you always see comparing similar proteins between related species
2) so short that they exist by chance alone in all sorts of proteins from every branch of the tree of life.
The paper is written by researchers at a university I’ve never heard of, and published in a journal that I’ve never heard of, and that is not peer-reviewed, so I’m already suspicious of its quality.
Just in bioRxiv's defense, it is not actually a journal, but a preprint server. It's a place people can post first drafts of papers while they are undergoing peer review. It's actually be really beneficial for the community because we get to read a lot of cool science anyway from six to eighteen months earlier (while it is working its way through the peer review process). You just have to be aware that there will also sometimes be papers posted that clearly would NOT pass peer review, so the reader, as a scientific peer, have to be critically evaluating all the claims, reasoning, and methods, just as they really should be in any paper, peer reviewed or otherwise.
The problem that crops up from time to time, and coronavirus has been a big one, is that the media/general public will sometimes come across these preprints (or bad actors, including sometimes the authors, will disseminate them) and treat them like a validated part of the peer reviewed literature, instead of a glimpse behind the curtain at how the sausage gets made.
There have been a bunch of calls for people to start doing ad hoc peer review of coronavirus preprints right there on bioRviv since so many non-scientists are searching through, and a lot of stuff is being posted, some incredibly timely useful --
the complete sequence of the novel corona virus was posted there about a week ago -- and a lot of it is complete junk. I don't know how effective that will be since posting "reviews" on BioRxiv just looks like random internet comments at the bottom of the page, and people outside the field aren't going to give them much weight.
The warning posted at the top of the website now may help more:
"bioRxiv is receiving many new papers on coronavirus 2019-nCoV. A reminder: these are preliminary reports that have not been peer-reviewed. They should not be regarded as conclusive, guide clinical practice/health-related behavior, or
be reported in news media as established information."