Headline here on HN seems somewhat misleading, and I fear for how this is likely to be spun. In this context "patented" does not mean "engineered" or "artificial". This is the complement to a genuine human sequence we all have. It's 19 nucleotides (28 bits) long, so unlikely (but not impossible in a cryptographic sense) to have arisen randomly. We do know viruses will pick up these sequences from their hosts though, so by itself this doesn't actually say much absent some statistics about how common that is.
Basically: please be careful here, a lot of people are going to want to treat this as a smoking gun, and it's not. It sure is interesting though.
I’m having trouble getting the patent to load on my phone, but my interpretation of the “codon optimized” patented sequence is that although the sequence codes for a naturally occurring protein sequence, the RNA triplets that are actually used are not naturally occurring.
MolBio 102 for software engineers: each amino acid is coded for by 3 RNA bases. However, the number of possible RNA triplets (4^3=64) is greater than the number of amino acids (20), so some amino acids have multiple triplets assigned to them. For instance, both UUA and CUG code for the same amino acid (leucine), but one of them is more efficient to express. The implicit argument is that consistent preferential use of these optimal codons is evidence of genetic engineering rather than natural evolution.
Basically: please be careful here, a lot of people are going to want to treat this as a smoking gun, and it's not. It sure is interesting though.