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Review
. 2015 Dec 22:12:221.
doi: 10.1186/s12985-015-0422-1.

Bat origin of human coronaviruses

Ben Hu  1 , Xingyi Ge  1 , Lin-Fa Wang  2 , Zhengli Shi  3
Affiliations
Review

Bat origin of human coronaviruses

Ben Hu et al. Virol J. .

Abstract

Bats have been recognized as the natural reservoirs of a large variety of viruses. Special attention has been paid to bat coronaviruses as the two emerging coronaviruses which have caused unexpected human disease outbreaks in the 21st century, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-CoV), are suggested to be originated from bats. Various species of horseshoe bats in China have been found to harbor genetically diverse SARS-like coronaviruses. Some strains are highly similar to SARS-CoV even in the spike protein and are able to use the same receptor as SARS-CoV for cell entry. On the other hand, diverse coronaviruses phylogenetically related to MERS-CoV have been discovered worldwide in a wide range of bat species, some of which can be classified to the same coronavirus species as MERS-CoV. Coronaviruses genetically related to human coronavirus 229E and NL63 have been detected in bats as well. Moreover, intermediate hosts are believed to play an important role in the transmission and emergence of these coronaviruses from bats to humans. Understanding the bat origin of human coronaviruses is helpful for the prediction and prevention of another pandemic emergence in the future.

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Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Phylogenetic analysis of bat coronaviruses with other coronaviruses. The phylogenetic tree was constructed based on 816-nt partial RdRp sequences (a) and full-length spike protein sequences (b). Available sequences were retrieved from GenBank and aligned using ClustalW. The alignment was used to construct tree by MEGA (Version 5.1) with the neighbor-joining statistical method. Bootstrap values were calculated from 1000 replicates (values ≥50 are shown). Bat coronaviruses are drawn in bold and named following bat species, plus BtCoV, strain name, and GenBank accession number
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