Probable Pangolin Origin of SARS-CoV-2 Associated with the COVID-19 Outbreak

By Tao Zhang, Qunfu Wu, Zhigang Zhang. Current Biology, 2020

1,362 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary An outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by the 2019 novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) began in the city of Wuhan in China and has widely spread worldwide. Currently, it is vital to explore potential intermediate hosts of SARS-CoV-2 to control COVID-19 spread. Therefore, we reinvestigated published data from pangolin lung samples from which SARS-CoV-like CoVs were detected by Liu et al. [1]. We found genomic and evolutionary evidence of the occurrence of a SARS-CoV-2-like CoV (named Pangolin-CoV) in dead Malayan pangolins. Pangolin-CoV is 91.02% and 90.55% identical to SARS-CoV-2 and BatCoV RaTG13, respectively, at the whole-genome level. Aside from RaTG13, Pangolin-CoV is the most closely related CoV to SARS-CoV-2. The S1 protein of Pangolin-CoV is much more closely related to SARS-CoV-2 than to RaTG13. Five key amino acid residues involved in the interaction with human ACE2 are completely consistent between Pangolin-CoV and SARS-CoV-2, but four amino acid mutations are present in RaTG13. Both Pangolin-CoV and RaTG13 lost the putative furin recognition sequence motif at S1/S2 cleavage site that can be observed in the SARS-CoV-2. Conclusively, this study suggests that pangolin species are a natural reservoir of SARS-CoV-2-like CoVs.

Subfields: Immunology, Infectious Diseases

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5663fd7a80d33f58bdbc5c8cbf3608543058eeff

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Immunology

1. Hannah Kleine-Weber
2. Ron Milo
3. S. Pöhlmann
4. M. Hoffmann

In Infectious Diseases

1. Hannah Kleine-Weber
2. S. Pöhlmann
3. M. Hoffmann

Citations in the corpus

• COVID‐19 and Older Adults: What We Know (2020, background): “Genomic sequence studies from Malaysia later suggested that the intermediate hosts were pangolins that were smuggled into China from Malaysia and sold at the Huanan seafood market.(4) The subsequent human-to-human spread set off what later turned into a pandemic.”
• SARS-CoV-2: Structure, Biology, and Structure-Based Therapeutics Development (2020, background): “…in the fight against COVID-19 in China (Ang et al., Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology | www.frontiersin.org 14 2020; Luo et al., 2020; Ren et al., 2020; Zhang et al., 2020a; Zhong et al., 2020), although further mechanistic studies and large-scale clinical trials are warranted.”
• Shipping markets in turmoil: An analysis of the Covid-19 outbreak and its implications (2020, neutral): “While this research is written, researches have not concluded on the origin of the virus, however, the most prominent theories are that it came from a human interaction either with bats (Rothan and Byrareddy, 2020) or with pangolins (Zhang et al., 2020).”
• COVID-19: The first documented coronavirus pandemic in history (2020, neutral): “of the similarity of the pangolin coronavirus to SARS-CoV-2 [32,33].”
• Automatic Detection of Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) in X-ray and CT Images: A Machine Learning Based Approach (2020, neutral): “Pangolins have also been identified as a potential intermediate host of COVID-19 [3].”
• A Multibasic Cleavage Site in the Spike Protein of SARS-CoV-2 Is Essential for Infection of Human Lung Cells (2020, positive): “However, it is noteworthy that all SARS-CoV-2-related coronaviruses of bats and pangolins identified today harbor a monobasic cleavage site (Lam et al., 2020; Li et al., 2020; Zhang et al., 2020).”
• COVID-19 and Multiorgan Response (2020, positive): “The origin and mechanism of which remain to be clarified—while some genomic studies suggested bats as the natural reservoir,(16) others suggested pangolins.(17) As the outbreak progressed, person-to-person transmission remains the main mode of spread.”
• A Review of SARS-CoV-2 and the Ongoing Clinical Trials (2020, background): “Incidental host Masked palm civets Dromedary camels Malayan pangolin [29]”
• SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) by the numbers (2020, background): “  For pangolin: (Zhang et al. 2020) “PangolinCoV is 91.02% and 90.55% identical to SARS-CoV-2 and  BatCoV RaTG13, respectively, at the whole genome level.””