Isolation and Characterization of 2019-nCoV-like Coronavirus from Malayan Pangolins

Abstract

The outbreak of 2019-nCoV in the central Chinese city of Wuhan at the end of 2019 poses unprecedent public health challenges to both China and the rest world 1 . The new coronavirus shares high sequence identity to SARS-CoV and a newly identified bat coronavirus 2 . While bats may be the reservoir host for various coronaviruses, whether 2019-nCoV has other hosts is still ambiguous. In this study, one coronavirus isolated from Malayan pangolins showed 100%, 98.2%, 96.7% and 90.4% amino acid identity with 2019-nCoV in the E, M, N and S genes, respectively. In particular, the receptor-binding domain of the S protein of the Pangolin-CoV is virtually identical to that of 2019-nCoV, with one amino acid difference. Comparison of available genomes suggests 2019-nCoV might have originated from the recombination of a Pangolin-CoV-like virus with a Bat-CoV-RaTG13-like virus. Infected pangolins showed clinical signs and histopathological changes, and the circulating antibodies reacted with the S protein of 2019-nCoV.

Genetic evolution analysis of 2019 novel coronavirus and coronavirus from other species

“…: MN996532), with 96.2% nucleotide homology in the whole genome Zhou et al, 2020). Other groups suggest that pangolin, mink, snake, turtle may be potential intermediate hosts for the virus (Association, 2020;Guo et al, 2020;Ji et al, 2020;Lam et al, 2020;Li et al, 2020;Liu et al, 2020a;Liu et al, 2020b;Xiao et al, 2020;Zhang et al, 2020a;Zhang et al, 2020b), which still need more evidence to be confirmed.…”

“…Moreover, SARS-CoV-2 and pangolin coronavirus is also highly related (Lam et al, 2020;Xiao et al, 2020;Zhang et al, 2020b), but due to incomplete sequence of pangolin coronavirus published in GenBank, reasonable analysis cannot be carried out in this study. Besides, it was reported that the SARS-CoV-2 virus did not come directly from pangolins .…”

COVID-19: Epidemiology, Evolution, and Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives

“…In addition, a recent preliminary report showed that the receptorbinding motif (RBM) of these two genomes shares a very low sequence similarity [56]. This divergence indicates a possible alternative source for the RBM encoding sequence in 2019-nCoV, as suggested by other preliminary reports [52,57]. Interestingly, Lam et al found several putative pangolin CoV sequences with 85.5% to 92.4% similarity to 2019-nCoV [52].…”

On the origin and continuing evolution of SARS-CoV-2

“…Pangolin SARSr-CoV from Guangdong (GD) [17], and six Pangolin SARSr-CoV genomes from Guangxi (GX) [18] (Table S1). We aligned the coding sequences (CDSs) based on the protein alignments (see Materials and Methods).…”

“…It has also been confirmed that the SARS-CoV-2 uses the same receptor, the angiotensin converting enzyme II (ACE2), as the SARS-CoV [11]. Although the specific route of transmission from natural reservoirs to humans remains unclear [5,13], several studies have shown that pangolins may have provided a partial spike gene to SARS-CoV-2; the critical functional sites in the spike protein of SAR-CoV-2 are nearly identical to one identified in a virus isolated from a pangolin [16][17][18].…”