Close relatives of the coronavirus may have been in bats for decades
Viruses from the coronavirus lineage responsible for COVID-19 have been circulating in bats for decades, long before the virus started infecting people last year, a new study suggests. How exactly the virus jumped to humans is still a mystery. But the study suggests the coronavirus most likely evolved in bats — such as intermediate horseshoe bats (Rhinolophus affinis), the source of the coronavirus that caused the 2003–2004 SARS outbreak — not snakes or pangolins as some researchers have suggested (SN: 1/24/20). Pangolins or another animal might still have been an intermediate host before the virus made it to humans. Maciej Boni, an epidemiologist at Penn State, and his colleagues examined the genetic blueprints of the new coronavirus, or SARS-CoV-2, and 67 related viruses. The analysis aimed to uncover the evolutionary history of SARS-CoV-2 and see if the virus had exchanged bits of genetic material with other coronaviruses, a process called recombination, to...