The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2

By Kristian G. Andersen, Andrew Rambaut, W. Lipkin, Edward C. Holmes, R. Garry. Nature Medicine, 2020

4,380 citations recorded by the source corpus.

SARS-CoV-2 is the seventh coronavirus known to infect humans; SARSCoV, MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 can cause severe disease, whereas HKU1, NL63, OC43 and 229E are associated with mild symptoms6. Here we review what can be deduced about the origin of SARS-CoV-2 from comparative analysis of genomic data. We offer a perspective on the notable features of the SARS-CoV-2 genome and discuss scenarios by which they could have arisen. Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.

Subfields: Infectious Diseases

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e2de7559663fb21dcd6d5a52ed926df62d405362

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In Infectious Diseases

Citations in the corpus

Structural and Functional Analysis of the D614G SARS-CoV-2 Spike Protein Variant (2020, neutral): “, 2020b), although the most proximal animal reservoir for SARS-CoV-2 remains unknown (Andersen et al., 2020; Lam et al., 2020).”
Decline in Mobility: Public Transport in Poland in the time of the COVID-19 Pandemic (2020, background): “COVID-19 is an infectious disease caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), a seventh coronavirus that can spread between humans (Andersen et al. 2020).”
Title: Mosaic nanoparticles elicit cross-reactive immune responses to zoonotic coronaviruses in mice (2020, positive): “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).”
Psychological distress, coping behaviors, and preferences for support among New York healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic (2020, background): “Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a global pandemic caused by Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) [1].”
SARS-CoV-2 and Coronavirus Disease 2019: What We Know So Far (2020, background): “Based on genomic sequencing, the RBD of SARS-CoV-2 appears to be a mutated version of its most closely related virus, RaTG13, sampled from bats (Rhinolophus affinis) [19] .”
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The COVID-19 Pandemic: A Comprehensive Review of Taxonomy, Genetics, Epidemiology, Diagnosis, Treatment, and Control (2020, background): “Differences in SARS-CoV-2 S protein and the high contagious nature of this virus suggest that SARS-CoV-2 has evolved via natural selection for binding to human ACE2 receptor [61].”
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COVID‐19 and Older Adults: What We Know (2020, background): “The viral sequence had a 96% similarity to a bat coronavirus, and, with no evidence of bat-to-human transmission, it was hypothesized that the virus spread to humans through an intermediate host.(1,3) Genomic sequence studies from Malaysia later suggested that the intermediate hosts were pangolins t”