Evolutionary Distance of SARS-CoV-2 and Bat Coronaviruses Studied Under the NIH-supported Research Grant to EcoHealth Alliance, reports NIH.
The spike protein
Coronaviruses use a protein called spike to bind to a protein on the surface of a host cell to facilitate infection. Some coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 use the angiotensin converting enzyme-2 (ACE2) protein to help enter and infect host cells.
Animal coronaviruses
In order to study animal coronaviruses circulating in nature, the investigators replaced the spike protein from a well-characterized bat coronavirus, WIV1-CoV, with the spike protein of animal coronaviruses recently discovered in bats in China. Using techniques common in virology, experiments involved a single round of infection in several cell lines, and in some cases, in mice that were genetically modified to express the human version of ACE2.
All other aspects of the mice, including the immune system, remained unchanged. The ACE2 transgenic mice were used to determine if spike proteins from bat coronaviruses discovered in China were capable of binding human ACE2, and therefore, whether the bat coronaviruses themselves, which were already present in the environment, could potentially infect humans and cause disease.
WIV1-CoV is not known to cause infection in humans but has been shown in the laboratory to infect both human cells and ACE2 transgenic mice , making it an ideal tool to use for these studies. Several of the bat coronaviruses used in these experiments were also found to be capable of replicating in ACE2 transgenic mice, indicating that the spike protein from the naturally occurring bat coronaviruses from which they were made could bind ACE2 in vivo.
About the research
The research that NIH approved under the grant to EcoHealth Alliance with a sub award to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China sought to understand how animal coronaviruses, especially bat coronaviruses, evolve naturally in the environment and have the potential to become transmissible to the human population.
This research included studying viral diversity in bat reservoirs, surveying people who work in live animal markets or other occupations with high exposure to wildlife for evidence of bat coronavirus infection and analyzing data to predict which newly discovered viruses pose the greatest threat to human health.
Questions have been raised about whether this NIH-funded research had a role in the emergence of SARS-CoV-2. In this regard, the chimeric viruses that were studied (WIV-1 virus with the various spike proteins obtained from bat viruses found in nature) were so far distant from an evolutionary standpoint from SARS-CoV-2 that they could not have possibly been the source of SARS-CoV-2 or the COVID-19 pandemic.
The body of the scientific data from this award including the bat coronavirus sequences published in the scientific literature and public databases makes this conclusion readily apparent to anyone with experience in and knowledge of virus phylogeny and evolutionary biology.
Outcome
From this analysis, it is evident that the viruses studied under the EcoHealth Alliance grant are very far distant from SARS-CoV-2. Included for comparison is RaTG13, one of the closest bat coronavirus relatives to SARS-CoV-2 collected by the Wuhan Institute of Virology and BANAL-52, one of several bat coronaviruses recently identified from bats living in caves in Laos .
Although RaTG13 and BANAL-52 are 96-97% identical to SARS-CoV-2 at the nucleotide level (>900 nucleotide differences across the entire genome), the difference actually represents decades of evolutionary divergence from SARS-CoV-2. Experts in evolutionary biology and virology have made it clear that even the closest known relatives of SARS-CoV-2, which were not studied under the EcoHealth Alliance grant, are evolutionarily too distant from SARS-CoV-2 to have been the progenitor of the COVID-19 pandemic. Field studies continue the search for more proximate progenitors.
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Source: NIH
