According to the paper in Nature, Shi's team found that the similarity between novel coronavirus sequence and bat coronavirus is as high as 96% at the genome level, which indicates that bats may be the source of coronavirus. This conclusion is consistent with the results published by the team on the preprint website of the paper on June 23, 65438/KLOC-0.

Coronavirus is a source of human infectious diseases. In the past 20 years, coronavirus has caused two large-scale epidemics: Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS). Previous studies have shown that SARSr-CoV, which mainly exists in bats, may lead to future disease outbreaks.

This paper shows that Shi and his colleagues analyzed the samples of 7 patients with severe pneumonia, 6 of whom were workers in a seafood market in Wuhan. The cases were first found in 20 19 and 12 seafood markets. The research team found that the full-length genome sequences obtained from five patients were almost identical-the similarity was over 99.9%, and the sequence consistency with SARS coronavirus was 79.5%.

The research team further compared the genome of novel coronavirus with some gene sequences of coronavirus detected in the laboratory earlier, and found that the virus was similar to a coronavirus (RaTG 13) from bat samples in China, and the sequence consistency of the two viruses was as high as 96.2%.

At the same time, the research team confirmed that novel coronavirus entered the cell in the same way as SARS coronavirus, that is, through the ACE2 cell receptor. Antibodies in patients infected with novel coronavirus showed the potential to neutralize the virus at low serum dilution, but whether the anti-SARS antibody can cross-react with novel coronavirus still needs the serum of patients recovered from SARS infection to confirm.

In addition, the research team also developed a test that can distinguish novel coronavirus from all other human coronaviruses, and showed that novel coronavirus was detected in the initial oral swab samples, but the samples collected later (about ten days later) did not show positive virus results.

This discovery shows that the most likely route of transmission of the virus is through the individual's respiratory tract, but the research team also pointed out that other routes are not impossible, and more patient data are still needed to further study the route of transmission.