Skip to content

Recovery of deleted sequencing data sheds light on the early SARS-CoV-2 epidemic [pdf]

biorxiv.org
2 pointsaleks2241 comment
On HN

Comments

Some web application hacking in action in this medical paper:

.. none of the deleted sequencing runs could be accessed through the SRA’s web interface. In addition, none of the runs could be accessed using the command-line tools of the SRA Toolkit. For instance, running fastq-dump SRR11313485 orvdb-dump SRR11313485 returned the message “err: query unauthorized while resolving query within virtual file system module - failed to resolve accession ’SRR11313485’“.
However, the SRA has begun storing all data on the Google and Amazon clouds. While inspecting the SRA’s web interface for other sequencing accessions, I noticed that SRA files are often available from links the other cloud such as https://storage.googleapis.com/nih-sequence-read-archive/run....
I interpolated the cloud URLs for the deleted accessions and tested if they still yielded the SRA files. This strategy was successful; for instance, as of June 3, 2021, going to https://storage.googleapis.com/nih-sequence-read-archive/run... downloads the SRA file for accession SRR1131348
AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.