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Review
. 2021 Apr 1:12:663815.
doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2021.663815. eCollection 2021.

Mink, SARS-CoV-2, and the Human-Animal Interface

Florence Fenollar  1   2 , Oleg Mediannikov  1   3 , Max Maurin  4 , Christian Devaux  1   3 , Philippe Colson  1   3 , Anthony Levasseur  1   3 , Pierre-Edouard Fournier  1   2 , Didier Raoult  1   3
Affiliations
Review

Mink, SARS-CoV-2, and the Human-Animal Interface

Florence Fenollar et al. Front Microbiol. .

Abstract

Mink are small carnivores of the Mustelidae family. The American mink is the most common and was imported to Europe, Asia, and Latin America for breeding, as its fur is very popular. Denmark, the Netherlands, and China are the biggest producers of mink. Mink farms with a high population density in very small areas and a low level of genetic heterogeneity are places conducive to contagion. The mink's receptor for SARS-CoV-2 is very similar to that of humans. Experimental models have shown the susceptibility of the ferret, another mustelid, to become infected with SARS-CoV-2 and to transmit it to other ferrets. On April 23, 2020, for the first time, an outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 in a mink farm was reported in the Netherlands. Since then, COVID-19 has reached numerous mink farms in the Netherlands, Denmark, United States, France, Greece, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Poland, Lithuania, and Canada. Not only do mink become infected from each other, but also they are capable of infecting humans, including with virus variants that have mutated in mink. Human infection with variant mink viruses with spike mutations led to the culling in Denmark of all mink in the country. Several animals can be infected with SARS-CoV-2. However, anthropo-zoonotic outbreaks have only been reported in mink farms. The rapid spread of SARS-CoV-2 in mink farms raises questions regarding their potential role at the onset of the pandemic and the impact of mutants on viral fitness, contagiousness, pathogenicity, re-infections with different mutants, immunotherapy, and vaccine efficacy.

Keywords: COVID-19; SARS-CoV-2; anthropo-zoonosis; ferret; mink; outbreak.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Distribution of the largest producers and the main mink farms worldwide. The four biggest producers are in red, the following ones are in orange.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Species naturally infected with SARS-CoV-2 and the origin of transmission (→).
Figure 3
Figure 3
Number and geographic origin of mink SARS-CoV-2 genomes available in the Global Initiative on Sharing Avian Influenza Data (GISAID database; https://www.gisaid.org/; Accessed February 02, 2021). (A) Pie chart of the number of SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences from minks per country, and proportion of the total number of SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences from minks; (B) Temporal distribution of the number of SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences from minks per day of sample collection.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Mink SARS-CoV-2 virus phylogeny. A total of 744 SARS-CoV-2, selected from GISAID (https://www.gisaid.org/), were integrated in a phylogenetic analysis. All genomes were aligned by using MAFFT version 7 (Katoh and Standley, 2013). A phylogenetic tree was reconstructed by using IQ-TREE with the GTR model with ultra-fast bootstrap of 1,000 repetitions (Minh et al., 2020). Sequences of mink from the Netherlands are highlighted in yellow, those from Denmark in green. The number next to the star is the number of genomes available for each mink SARS-CoV-2 genotype.
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