London, September 19 (Xinhua) -- A study published in the British magazine Nature's preprint platform "Research Square" showed that the coronavirus carried by the chrysanthemum bat that inhabits some caves in northern Laos has common key characteristics with the new crown virus, which indicates that there are viruses closely related to the new crown virus in nature.
In the new study, researchers from the Institut Pasteur and the University of Laos in France captured 645 bats from 46 species in the limestone "karst zone" of northern Laos between July 2020 and January 2021, and conducted sampling studies on whether the coronavirus carried by these bats was similar to the new coronavirus.
Previously, Western media said that the RaTG13 coronavirus is the closest to the new crown virus. But the new study shows that the RBD of these three coronaviruses carried by the aforementioned chrysanthemum bat is closer to the new coronavirus than the bat coronavirus RaTG13 found in Yunnan.
Professor David Robertson, head of viral genomics at the Virus Research Center at the University of Glasgow in the United Kingdom, said in a previous interview with Xinhua News Agency that the statement that "RaTG13 coronavirus is closest to the new coronavirus" is easy to mislead, because there are many coronaviruses in nature that are spreading, and many coronaviruses have not been sampled.
Edward Holmes, a virology researcher at the University of Sydney in Australia who was not involved in the above-mentioned study by the Pasteur Institute and the University of Laos, pointed out that continuous sample collection is the only way to understand the origin of the virus. The study highlights that bat coronaviruses that exist in nature are highly susceptible to human infection, which is a clear risk to the future.
Source: Tonight's newspaper