Sagnik Nag, Amity University, Kolkata
Severe respiratory disease coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) results in the extensively devastating disease, COVID-19, of the recent century. One of the unsolved scientific concerns around SARS-CoV-2 is the animal lineage of this virus. Bats and pangolins are acknowledged as considerably reasonable reservoir hosts that harbor the highly related SARS-CoV-2 related viruses. Identification of a class of novel coronavirus in bats has hinted at the animal origin of SARS-CoV-2 all the more. The scientific finding of SARS-CoV-2 related viruses (SARSr-CoV-2), RaTG13, and Pangolin-CoV from horseshoe bats and pangolin respectively, alleviate light on the implication of these two groups as animal reservoirs of SARSr-CoV-2 infections. Bats also transmit SARSr-CoV with all the genetic building blocks of SARS-CoV-1, which leaped to humans in 2002. Hence, scrutiny of the newly identified bat SARSr-CoVs is significant for delineating the origin and immediate progenitor viruses of SARS-CoV-2. It is also crucial for public health measures to impede future outbreaks caused by this species of viruses.
Amidst the thriving calls to investigate the origins of Covid-19, Chinese researchers have discovered a novel coronavirus in bats. One of them, the Rhinolophus pusillus virus, maybe genetically the second-closest identical to the Covid-19 virus till now. This finding of recent coronaviruses in bats appears amid growing calls for a timely, transparent, and evidence-based autonomous technique for the next phase of the WHO-convened COVID-19 origins research.
The findings of this novel coronavirus in bats in a single, small province of Yunnan district in China demonstrated just how many coronaviruses can prevail in bats and how many of them have the potential to scatter to people and a wide spectrum of domestic and wild animals, comprising pigs, cattle, mice, cats, dogs, and chickens. In early 2020, a novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, was acknowledged as the causative agent of a pneumonia outbreak in Wuhan, China, that eventually whirled into a multinational pestilence, killing lakhs of people. Now, scientists and nations are calling for supplementary investigations to extrapolate whether the virus emanated naturally or trickled from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The researchers obtained 283 fecal samples, 109 oral swabs, and 19 urine specimens from forest-dwelling bats in a tropical botanical grassland and adjacent regions in a county in Yunnan district between May 2019 and November 2020. In an article disseminated in the journal Cell, the Chinese experimenters from Shandong University announced, in cumulative, they have compiled 24 novel coronavirus genomes from several bat species, incorporating four SARS-CoV-2 like coronaviruses. In tracking the lineage of SARS-CoV-2 from bats, they identified RaTG13, which stakes 96.2% genome identity to SARS-CoV-2 and is so far the nearest genome. Now researchers are striving to discover the recent origin of SARS-CoV-2. Although bats are the plausible source, the experimenters said it’s relatively reasonable that the virus infected an intermediary animal. The SARS virus that resulted in the 2002-2004 episode was tracked to an animal called a civet cat.
The conception of the COVID-19 inflicting virus is yet to be verified by the researchers, however, they have acknowledged that the virus is extensively feasible of zoonotic origin, from bats or another approximately related mammal. Nonetheless, the identification of a class of novel coronavirus in bats indicate that they are a notable reservoir hosts for a variety of afflictions that inflict serious diseases in humans such as the Ebola virus and, most notably, coronaviruses. In the future, more standardized and longitudinal sampling of bats, pangolins, or other reasonable intermediary animals is required to adequately discern the conception of SARS-CoV-2.
Also read: Henneguya salminicola: A non-oxygen breathing animal
Reference:
- Hua Guo, Ben Hu, Hao-rui Si, Yan Zhu, Wei Zhang, Bei Li, Ang Li, Rong Geng, Hao-Feng Lin, Xing-Lou Yang, Peng Zhou, Zheng-Li Shi. (2021). Identification of a novel lineage bat SARS-related coronaviruses that use bat ACE2 receptor. bioRxiv.doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.05.21.445091
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Excellent research work! Keep up the good work 👍🏻👍🏻