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Scientists may know where coronavirus originated, study says - Fox News

Scientists may know where coronavirus originated, study says - Fox News

Scientists may know where coronavirus originated, study says - Fox News
Sep 17, 2020 1 min, 46 secs

Months into the coronavirus pandemic, researchers are still investigating the actual event where the crossover of the novel coronavirus from animals to humans occurred.

They discovered the lineage responsible for producing the virus that created the COVID-19 pandemic has been present in bats, according to the study.

While it is possible that pangolins, or another hitherto undiscovered species, may have acted as an intermediate host facilitating transmission to humans, current evidence is consistent with the virus having evolved in bats resulting in bat sarbecoviruses that can replicate in the upper respiratory tract of both humans and pangolins," the study authors said in the published report.

The novel coronavirus evolved from other bat viruses from 40-70 years ago, the team of researchers said.

In a news release provided to Fox News, the researchers said that SARS-CoV-2 is similar genetically (about 96%) to the RaTG13 coronavirus found in a sample of the Rhinolophus affinis horseshoe bat in 2013 in Yunnan province, China, but it diverged from RaTG13 back in 1969.

The novel coronavirus shares a trait with older members of its lineage regarding the receptor-binding domain (RBD) on its spike protein, which allows it to bind with human receptor cells, the authors said.

“This means that other viruses that are capable of infecting humans are circulating in horseshoe bats in China," co-author of the study, David Robertson, who is a professor of computational virology at MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research, explained in the release!

The authors of the study said other groups of researchers were incorrect in suggesting that evolutionary changes that occurred in pangolins allowed the novel coronavirus to be transmitted to humans.

“While it is possible that pangolins may have acted as an intermediate host facilitating transmission of SARS-CoV-2 to humans, no evidence exists to suggest that pangolin infection is a requirement for bat viruses to cross into humans," Robertson also stated in the report. “Instead, our research suggests that SARS-CoV-2 likely evolved the ability to replicate in the upper respiratory tract of both humans and pangolins.”.

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