The new coronavirus appears to have circulated unnoticed in bats for decades, scientists found.
Horseshoe bats are the most plausible origin of the SARS-CoV-2 pathogen, researchers led by Maciej Boni of Pensylvania State University’s Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics said in a study published Tuesday in Nature Microbiology.
The virus’s origins have been at the center of much debate as the pandemic continues to stymie economies and the death toll surpasses 654,000. The World Health Organization sent experts to China to study the issue this month after U.S. government officials stoked speculation that the pathogen escaped from a Chinese lab.
Tracing the virus’s lineage is crucial early in an outbreak because it can allow health authorities to separate people from the pathogen’s animal host, and later to help avert future health crises. The researchers warned that other virus lineages in bats could have the potential to spread to humans.
The findings highlight how “difficult it will be to identify viruses with potential to cause major human outbreaks before they emerge,” Boni and colleagues wrote. “This underscores the need for a global network of real-time human disease surveillance systems.”
The research team reconstructed the virus’s evolution by tracing its recombination history. They concluded that pangolins probably didn’t act as a host for the virus although the scaly mammals may have played a role in touching off the pandemic by simply transmitting it.
The discoveries, which researchers made by reconstructing the evolutionary history of SARS-CoV-2, have implications for the prevention of future pandemics stemming from this lineage.
“Coronaviruses have genetic material that is highly recombinant, meaning different regions of the virus’s genome can be derived from multiple sources,” says Maciej Boni, associate professor of biology at Penn State.
“This has made it difficult to reconstruct SARS-CoV-2’s origins. You have to identify all the regions that have been recombining and trace their histories.”
A SARS-CoV-2 'family tree'
The team used three different bioinformatic approaches to identify and remove the recombinant regions within the SARS-CoV-2 genome. Next, they reconstructed phylogenetic histories for the non-recombinant regions and compared them to each other to see which specific viruses have been involved in recombination events in the past.
They were able to reconstruct the evolutionary relationships between SARS-CoV-2 and its closest known bat and pangolin viruses.
Horseshoe bats are the most plausible origin of the SARS-CoV-2 pathogen, researchers led by Maciej Boni of Pensylvania State University’s Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics said in a study published Tuesday in Nature Microbiology.
The virus’s origins have been at the center of much debate as the pandemic continues to stymie economies and the death toll surpasses 654,000. The World Health Organization sent experts to China to study the issue this month after U.S. government officials stoked speculation that the pathogen escaped from a Chinese lab.
Tracing the virus’s lineage is crucial early in an outbreak because it can allow health authorities to separate people from the pathogen’s animal host, and later to help avert future health crises. The researchers warned that other virus lineages in bats could have the potential to spread to humans.
The findings highlight how “difficult it will be to identify viruses with potential to cause major human outbreaks before they emerge,” Boni and colleagues wrote. “This underscores the need for a global network of real-time human disease surveillance systems.”
The research team reconstructed the virus’s evolution by tracing its recombination history. They concluded that pangolins probably didn’t act as a host for the virus although the scaly mammals may have played a role in touching off the pandemic by simply transmitting it.
The discoveries, which researchers made by reconstructing the evolutionary history of SARS-CoV-2, have implications for the prevention of future pandemics stemming from this lineage.
“Coronaviruses have genetic material that is highly recombinant, meaning different regions of the virus’s genome can be derived from multiple sources,” says Maciej Boni, associate professor of biology at Penn State.
“This has made it difficult to reconstruct SARS-CoV-2’s origins. You have to identify all the regions that have been recombining and trace their histories.”
A SARS-CoV-2 'family tree'
The team used three different bioinformatic approaches to identify and remove the recombinant regions within the SARS-CoV-2 genome. Next, they reconstructed phylogenetic histories for the non-recombinant regions and compared them to each other to see which specific viruses have been involved in recombination events in the past.
They were able to reconstruct the evolutionary relationships between SARS-CoV-2 and its closest known bat and pangolin viruses.
