Abstract
In the last two decades, several coronavirus (CoV) interspecies jumping events have occurred between bats and other animals/humans, leading to major epidemics/pandemics and high fatalities. The SARS epidemic in 2002/2003 had a ~10% fatality. The discovery of SARS-related CoVs in horseshoe bats and civets and genomic studies have confirmed bat-to-civet-to-human transmission. The MERS epidemic that emerged in 2012 had a ~35% mortality, with dromedaries as the reservoir. Although CoVs with the same genome organization (e.g., Tylonycteris BatCoV HKU4 and Pipistrellus BatCoV HKU5) were also detected in bats, there is still a phylogenetic gap between these bat CoVs and MERS-CoV. In 2016, 10 years after the discovery of Rhinolophus BatCoV HKU2 in Chinese horseshoe bats, fatal swine disease outbreaks caused by this virus were reported in southern China. In late 2019, an outbreak of pneumonia emerged in Wuhan, China, and rapidly spread globally, leading to >4,000,000 fatalities so far. Although the genome of SARS-CoV-2 is highly similar to that of SARS-CoV, patient zero and the original source of the pandemic are still unknown. To protect humans from future public health threats, measures should be taken to monitor and reduce the chance of interspecies jumping events, either occurring naturally or through recombineering experiments.
Highlights
Coronaviruses (CoVs) are positive-sense, single-stranded RNA viruses that infect mammals and birds
CoVs are classified into four genera, Alphacoronavirus, Betacoronavirus, Gammacoronavirus and Deltacoronavirus, of which Betacoronavirus is subclassifed into five subgenera, namely Embecovirus, Sarbecovirus, Merbecovirus, Nobecovirus and Hibecovirus
We review the probable CoV interspecies jumping events that are known to have occurred between bats and other animals/humans, most of which have resulted in major epidemics and pandemics and frighteningly high fatalities
Summary
Coronaviruses (CoVs) are positive-sense, single-stranded RNA viruses that infect mammals and birds. A variable number of additional accessory genes that code for accessory proteins may be present downstream to ORF1ab These accessory proteins do not display significant homologies to those from other more distantly related CoV species [5]. The S protein is located on the surface of the virus During an infection, it binds to the receptor of the host, resulting in virus entry [20]. It binds to the receptor of the host, resulting in virus entry [20] It is undeniably the most crucial protein that determines whether a particular CoV can infect a specific host, and mutations in the S gene, either naturally or through recombineering experiments, may lead to potential interspecies jumping [21,22,23,24,25,26,27]. Transmission and adaptation of CoVs between different bat species, such as the jumping of Bat coronavirus HKU10 between Leschenault’s rousettes (Rousettus leschenaulti) and Pomona leaf-nosed bats (Hipposideros Pomona), will not be included [35]
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