An international team published a report in the British journal Nature Microbiology on the 28th that the covid-19 virus may have diverged from the most closely related bat virus 40 to 70 years ago, which means that the covid-19 virus was produced. The lineage of the virus may have been circulating in bats for decades.
It is difficult to understand the evolution history of the covid-19 virus in depth, because different viruses exchange genetic material and recombine, and the subregions of the viral genome may originate from different ancestors. Existing studies have identified the bat virus RaTG13 as the virus most closely related to the covid-19 virus, and studies have found similar coronaviruses in pangolins.
Researchers from Pennsylvania State University in the United States, the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom, the University of Hong Kong in China and other institutions analyzed the evolution of the covid-19 virus based on the genome data of the B coronavirus branch B (the subgenus of coronavirus to which the covid-19 virus belongs) history.
The researchers used three methods to identify areas of the covid-19 virus that have not undergone recombination and that can be used to reconstruct the evolution of the virus. All methods show that RaTG13 and covid-19 viruses have a common single ancestral lineage. It is estimated that the covid-19 viruses differentiated from bat viruses in the B coronavirus branch B in 1948, 1969, and 1982, respectively.
The study also concluded that although the covid-19 virus and related viruses carried by pangolins share a common ancestor, and pangolins may have played a role in the transmission of the covid-19 virus from animals to humans, pangolins are unlikely It is the intermediate host of the covid-19 virus.
Researchers believe that the long differentiation time of the covid-19 virus indicates that there may be an unsampled, potentially infectious bat virus lineage. At the same time, the existing diversity and dynamic process of virus recombination in the bat virus lineage proves that it is quite difficult to identify viruses that may cause major human epidemics in advance.
The corresponding author of the report, Macei Boni of Pennsylvania State University, pointed out that relevant parties need to establish an extensive and real-time surveillance system to detect viruses like covid-19 in time when the number of infected cases is still at a low level. virus.
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