An international team of scientists from Japan, the US, Australia, and Belgium has detected a new Covid-19-like virus from a species of moustached bats in Brazil, stoking fears of a potential spillover and a new disease.
Bats are natural reservoirs for many viruses, including betacoronaviruses- which include the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome virus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome virus (MERS-CoV).
The team from the universities of Osaka and Sydney detected the virus called BRZ batCoV from the Pteronotus parnellii- a small insect-eating bat known for tiny hair tufts on its face.
Even though the bat species is common in South America, experts fear the virus might have been gaining ground for months.
“We identified a full-length genome of a novel bat CoV (BRZ batCoV) from a Pteronotus parnellii bat sampled in Brazil that is phylogenetically distinct from known betacoronaviruses,” said the researchers, in a paper not yet peer-reviewed and published on pre-print site BioRxiv.
The team analysed the species’ evolutionary development and found that “the virus is sufficiently distinct from the five recognised Betacoronavirus subgenera to represent a new subgenus”.
“Of note, the spike protein of this novel bat coronavirus possesses a functional furin cleavage site at the S1/S2 junction with a unique amino acid sequence motif (RDAR) that differs from that found in SARS-CoV-2 (RRAR) by only one amino acid,” the team said.
The furin cleavage site is important in determining host range, infectivity, and cross-species transmission. It has been identified in the surface proteins of other RNA viruses, such as the highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses (Orthomyxoviridae) and the Ebola viruses, as well as the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which led to the recent global pandemic.
In addition, the team found that BRZ batCoV is not the same as Covid, rather it is more closely related to MERS viruses.
MERS, also known as camel flu, spreads less easily than Covid but is much deadlier, killing about one-third of patients.
Although the new flu strain shows “alarming exposure rates”, it may be spreading silently across countries, Hongbo Bao, a researcher from the Changchun Veterinary Research Institute in China, was quoted as saying to the US Sun, an American edition of the British tabloid.
However, as per the scientists who found the new bat virus, there is no evidence that BRZ batCoV infects humans or spreads beyond bat populations.
They note that the discovery “provides important insights into the evolutionary potential and zoonotic risk of BRZ batCoV”.
The findings “highlight the role of bats as potential reservoirs of genetic innovations relevant to zoonotic emergence,” they added. (IANS)
