This is to prevent a new pandemic

Origin of “Sars-CoV-2” discovered: The question of the origin of the coronavirus has been raised since the beginning of the pandemic. Many scientists are trying to find out how the virus came about and how the risk of it being transmitted to humans can be reduced.

An international research team has now worked in a new study presents its results. Accordingly, “Sars-CoV-2” has existed in bats for several decades – and that goes completely unnoticed. Related species may also transmit the virus to humans. According to the researchers, this must be prevented.

Coronavirus genetic material difficult to identify

Maciej Boni, Professor of Biology at the Pennsylvania State University in the USA, explains the difficulty in researching the coronavirus. “Coronaviruses have genetic material that is highly recombinant. This means that different regions of the virus genome come from multiple sources. This has made it difficult to reconstruct the origins of Sars-CoV-2,” it says on the part of the university.

The process of the research team builds on this knowledge. The different regions of the genome were identified by the scientists and checked for their origin. This enabled the evolutionary relationships between “Sars-CoV-2” and its next known bat and pangolin viruses to be reconstructed.

About 40 to 70 years ago, the lineage of the viruses, to which “Sars-CoV-2” belongs, separated from other bat viruses.

Sars-CoV-2: Related viruses in horseshoe bats

According to the researchers, there is a coronavirus that is 96 percent identical to “Sars-CoV-2”. This coronavirus was discovered in a bat in the Chinese province of Yunnan in 2013 and is most similar to “Sars-CoV-2” as it exists today. However, it was also possible to establish that the two types of virus have developed differently since at least 1969.

One of the older features that “Sars-CoV-2” shares with its related species is how the virus attaches to the surface of human cells. “This means that other viruses that can infect humans are circulating in horseshoe bats in China,” said Professor David L. Robertson of the University of Glasgow, according to the report by the Pennsylvania State University.

The team concluded that better sampling of wild bats and the implementation of systems for monitoring human diseases are necessary to prevent future pandemics. Novel pathogens must be identified in humans at an early stage in order to be able to react in real time.

Researcher on Sars-CoV-2: “This will not be our last coronavirus pandemic.”

Such an approach could have prevented a lot as a precautionary measure this year, but things should be different in the future. “We reacted too late to the first Sars-CoV-2 outbreak, but this will not be our last coronavirus pandemic. A much more comprehensive real-time monitoring system must be put in place to intercept such viruses when the number of cases is still in double digits “explains Bonuses.

–