Abstract
Since the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) 18 years ago, a large number of SARS-related coronaviruses (SARSr-CoVs) have been discovered in their natural reservoir host, bats1–4. Previous studies have shown that some bat SARSr-CoVs have the potential to infect humans5–7. Here we report the identification and characterization of a new coronavirus (2019-nCoV), which caused an epidemic of acute respiratory syndrome in humans in Wuhan, China. The epidemic, which started on 12 December 2019, had caused 2,794 laboratory-confirmed infections including 80 deaths by 26 January 2020. Full-length genome sequences were obtained from five patients at an early stage of the outbreak. The sequences are almost identical and share 79.6% sequence identity to SARS-CoV. Furthermore, we show that 2019-nCoV is 96% identical at the whole-genome level to a bat coronavirus. Pairwise protein sequence analysis of seven conserved non-structural proteins domains show that this virus belongs to the species of SARSr-CoV. In addition, 2019-nCoV virus isolated from the bronchoalveolar lavage fluid of a critically ill patient could be neutralized by sera from several patients. Notably, we confirmed that 2019-nCoV uses the same cell entry receptor—angiotensin converting enzyme II (ACE2)—as SARS-CoV.
Highlights
Samples from seven patients with severe pneumonia, who were admitted to the intensive care unit of Wuhan Jin Yin-Tan Hospital at the beginning of the outbreak, were sent to the laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) for the diagnosis of the causative pathogen (Extended Data Table 1)
WIV07) (GISAID accession numbers EPI_ISL_402127–402130) that were more than 99.9% identical to each other were subsequently obtained from four additional patients using next-generation sequencing and PCR (Extended Data Table 2)
The amino acid sequences of the seven conserved replicase domains in ORF1ab that were used for CoV species classification were 94.4% identical between 2019-nCoV and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)-CoV, suggesting that the two viruses belong to the same species, SARSr-CoV
Summary
The disease was determined to be caused by virus-induced pneumonia by clinicians according to clinical symptoms and other criteria, including a rise in body temperature, decreases in the number of lymphocytes and white blood cells ( levels of the latter were sometimes normal), new pulmonary infiltrates on chest radiography and no obvious improvement after treatment with antibiotics for three days. It appears that most of the early cases had contact history with the original seafood market; the disease has progressed to be transmitted by human-to-human contact.
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