Rodent species as possible SARS-CoV-2 spills
1 Laboratorio de Biotecnología Genómica, Centro de Biotecnología Genómica, Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Cd. Reynosa, Tamaulipas 88710, México.
2 Laboratorio de Biomedicina Molecular, Centro de Biotecnología Genómica, Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Cd. Reynosa, Tamaulipas 88710, México.
Review Article
GSC Biological and Pharmaceutical Sciences, 2023, 22(01), 295-301.
Article DOI: 10.30574/gscbps.2023.22.1.0029
Publication history:
Received on 05 December 2022; revised on 19 January 2023; accepted on 21 January 2023
Abstract:
The current worldwide outbreak of COVID-19 is associated with a novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. This outbreak has been tentatively associated with a seafood market in Wuhan, China, where the sale of wild animals may be the source of the zoonotic infection. When the epidemic, which began on December 12, 2019, had caused 2,794 laboratory-confirmed infections, including 80 deaths, as of January 26, 2020, whole-genome sequences were obtained from five patients early in the outbreak. The sequences were nearly identical and shared 79.6% sequence identity with SARS-CoV. In addition, SARS-CoV-2 has been shown to be 96% genome-wide identical to a bat coronavirus. Phylogenetic analysis of the virus spike proteins indicates that SARS-CoV-2 is classified into several small subclades, including a bat coronavirus RaTG13, suggesting that bats are a likely natural origin. Refined alignment of the spike proteins at NCBI showed that several sequences are conserved with high similarity within SARS-CoV-2 and/or SARS-CoV isolates from Rattus norvegicus and/or Mus musculus, suggesting that rodents may be intermediate reservoirs for SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV.
Keywords:
SARS-CoV; SARS-CoV-2; Coronavirus; Zoonoses; Rodents; Spills
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Copyright © 2023 Author(s) retain the copyright of this article. This article is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Liscense 4.0
