A Novel Bat Coronavirus Closely Related to SARS-CoV-2 Contains Natural Insertions at the S1/S2 Cleavage Site of the Spike Protein
By Hong Zhou, Xing Chen, Tao Hu, Juan Li, Hao Song, Yanran Liu, Peihan Wang, Di Liu, Jing Yang, Edward C. Holmes and 3 more. 2020
472 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The unprecedented pandemic of pneumonia caused by a novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, in China and beyond has had major public health impacts on a global scale [1, 2]. Although bats are regarded as the most likely natural hosts for SARS-CoV-2 [3], the origins of the virus remain unclear. Here, we report a novel bat-derived coronavirus, denoted RmYN02, identified from a metagenomic analysis of samples from 227 bats collected from Yunnan Province in China between May and October 2019. Notably, RmYN02 shares 93.3% nucleotide identity with SARS-CoV-2 at the scale of the complete virus genome and 97.2% identity in the 1ab gene, in which it is the closest relative of SARS-CoV-2 reported to date. In contrast, RmYN02 showed low sequence identity (61.3%) to SARS-CoV-2 in the receptor-binding domain (RBD) and might not bind to angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2). Critically, and in a similar manner to SARS-CoV-2, RmYN02 was characterized by the insertion of multiple amino acids at the junction site of the S1 and S2 subunits of the spike (S) protein. This provides strong evidence that such insertion events can occur naturally in animal betacoronaviruses.
Subfields: Animal Science and Zoology, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Infectious Diseases
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Citations in the corpus
- Evolutionary origins of the SARS-CoV-2 sarbecovirus lineage responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic (2020, background): “…thought to be instrumental to SARS-CoV-2’s ability to infect humans – a polybasic cleavage site insertion in the Spike protein – has been seen in another close bat relative of the SARS-CoV-2 virus (Zhou et al., 2020a); however, the sequence is different and it is likely an independent event.”
- Structural and Functional Analysis of the D614G SARS-CoV-2 Spike Protein Variant (2020, unknown): “Hundreds of coronaviruses have been identified in bats, including at least 50 SARS-like Sarbecoviruses (Lu et al., 2020; Zhou et al., 2020a).”
- Title: Mosaic nanoparticles elicit cross-reactive immune responses to zoonotic coronaviruses in mice (2020, unknown): “We also included RBDs from the GX pangolin clade 1/2 coronavirus (referred to here as pang17) (39), RaTG13, the bat clade 1/2 virus most closely related to SARS-CoV-2 (40), RmYN02, a clade 2 bat virus from China (41), and BtKY72, a Kenyan bat clade 3 virus (42).”
- A Multibasic Cleavage Site in the Spike Protein of SARS-CoV-2 Is Essential for Infection of Human Lung Cells (2020, background): “It will thus be interesting to determine how themultibasicmotif was acquired by SARS-CoV-2, and a recent study suggested that a recombination event might have been responsible (Zhang et al., 2020; Zhou et al., 2020a).”