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
131 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Summary 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, Infectious Diseases
Citations in the corpus
- Recurrent deletions in the SARS-CoV-2 spike glycoprotein drive antibody escape (2021, unknown): “4 Main text: 37 SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a yet-to-be defined animal reservoir and initiated a pandemic in 2020 (1-5).”
- Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 on mink farms between humans and mink and back to humans (2020, unknown): “lated coronaviruses found in bats (5, 6) and pangolins (7, 8)”
- Sarbecovirus ORF6 proteins hamper induction of interferon signaling (2021, unknown): “SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 are closely related, both belong to the family Coronaviridae, genus Betacoronavirus and subgenus Sarbecovirus (Lam et al., 2020; Zhou et al., 2020b).”
- Complete mapping of mutations to the SARS-CoV-2 spike receptor-binding domain that escape antibody recognition (2020, unknown): “We chose staining and sorting conditions that would select for variants with ACE2 affinity comparable to or better than RaTG13, the homolog with the lowest affinity that still marginally mediates cell entry (Shang et al., 2020) .”