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Review
. 2021 Jun 25;13(7):1226.
doi: 10.3390/v13071226.

Coronaviruses in Bats: A Review for the Americas

Itandehui Hernández-Aguilar  1 , Consuelo Lorenzo  1 , Antonio Santos-Moreno  2 , Eduardo J Naranjo  1 , Darío Navarrete-Gutiérrez  1
Affiliations
Review

Coronaviruses in Bats: A Review for the Americas

Itandehui Hernández-Aguilar et al. Viruses. .

Abstract

The SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus is the focus of attention as it has caused more than three million human deaths globally. This and other coronaviruses, such as MERS-CoV, have been suggested to be related to coronaviruses that are hosted in bats. This work shows, through a bibliographic review, the frequency of detection of coronavirus in bats species of the Americas. The presence of coronavirus in bats has been examined in 25 investigations in 11 countries of the Americas between 2007 and 2020. Coronaviruses have been explored in 9371 individuals from 160 species of bats, and 187 coronavirus sequences have been deposited in GenBank distributed in 43 species of bats. While 91% of the coronaviruses sequences identified infect a single species of bat, the remainder show a change of host, dominating the intragenera change. So far, only Mex-CoV-6 is related to MERS-CoV, a coronavirus pathogenic for humans, so further coronavirus research effort in yet unexplored bat species is warranted.

Keywords: Alphacoronavirus; Betacoronavirus; COVID-19; Chiropterans; MERS; SARS; host.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest. The funders had no role in the design of the study; in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript, or in the decision to publish the results.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Geographic location of the countries of the Americas where coronavirus studies have been carried out in bats. The list of bat species (naturally infected) with coronavirus sequences deposited in GenBank is indicated for some countries. The names of the bat species in which experimental infection has been carried out are shown in different colors. Red: cell infection; green: viral isolation; brown: seroconversion; purple: coronavirus adaptation.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Number of studies examining natural infection, experimental coronavirus infection in bat cells, and coronavirus isolation over time.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Bipartite network of coronaviruses sequences available in GenBank detected in bat species in the Americas. The upper boxes are the host bat species that belong to the Phyllostomidae family (green), Molossidae (yellow), Vespertilionidae (brown), and Mormoopidae (orange). The lower boxes in blue correspond to the coronavirus viral sequence according to the coronavirus sequence number in Table S1.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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