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Indeed there are multiple ways to skin the cat. For example, as early as 2008, Baric and others spelled out recombinant techniques that satisfy the construction of replication competent coronaviruses:
Here’s another one in which the actual spike of bat coronavirus was dropped into mouse-adapted SARs-CoV….using simple BglI:
There’s no secrete here in terms of can it be done. Of course it can. Fundamental to accidental lab leak hypothesis Vs natural spillover is the question of ruling out the possibility of the later with molecular signature from the former. This is incredibly difficult to investigate. I’m not there yet. Perhaps an in-depth analysis of CoV phylogenies is due from your camp. The virologists seem to think these types of analyses have elucidated a viable hypothesis for natural spillover. I still need to dig in that fertile ground…