A Pneumonia Outbreak Associated With a New Coronavirus of Probable Bat Origin

Auteur : Peng Zhou,Xing-Lou Yang, Xian-Guang Wang, Ben Hu, Lei Zhang, Wei Zhang,¹Hao-Rui Si, Yan Zhu, Bei Li, Chao-Lin Huang, Hui-Dong Chen, Jing Chen, Yun Luo, Hua Guo, Ren-Di Jiang, Mei-Qin Liu, Ying Chen, Xu-Rui Shen, Xi Wang, Xiao-Shuang Zheng, Kai Zhao, Quan-Jiao Chen, Fei Deng, Lin-Lin Liu, Bing Yan, Fa-Xian Zhan, Yan-Yi Wang, Geng-Fu Xiao and Zheng-Li Shi

Production : Nature, revue scientifique généraliste de référence, à comité de lecture et publiée de manière hebdomadaire. C’est l’une des revues scientifiques les plus anciennes et les plus réputées au monde.

Diffusion : Le site de la revue Nature.

Date : 3 février 2020

Since the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) 18 years ago, a large number of SARS-related coronaviruses (SARSr-CoVs) have been discovered in their natural reservoir host, bats. Previous studies have shown that some bat SARSr-CoVs have the potential to infect humans. Here we report the identification and characterization of a new coronavirus (2019-nCoV), which caused an epidemic of acute respiratory syndrome in humans in Wuhan, China. The epidemic, which started on 12 December 2019, had caused 2,794 laboratory-confirmed infections including 80 deaths by 26 January 2020. Full-length genome sequences were obtained from five patients at an early stage of the outbreak. The sequences are almost identical and share 79.6% sequence identity to SARS-CoV. Furthermore, we show that 2019-nCoV is 96% identical at the whole-genome level to a bat coronavirus. Pairwise protein sequence analysis of seven conserved non-structural proteins domains show that this virus belongs to the species of SARSr-CoV. In addition, 2019-nCoV virus isolated from the bronchoalveolar lavage fluid of a critically ill patient could be neutralized by sera from several patients. Notably, we confirmed that 2019-nCoV uses the same cell entry receptor—angiotensin converting enzyme II (ACE2)—as SARS-CoV.

Source : Zhou, P., Yang, X., Wang, X. et al. “A pneumonia outbreak associated with a new coronavirus of probable bat origin”. Nature 579, 270–273 (2020). DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2012-7 (consulté le 07/07/2020).

Photo “à la une” : Fig. 1: Genome characterization of 2019-nCoV. © DR.