Scientists had thought that the bat coronaviruses that cause COVID-19 had a common ancestor. Researchers say it's very unlikely that the direct ancestors of the disease are found.
The full genomes of the bat coronaviruses suggest they are related to one another. Each section has its own evolutionary history due to the fact that the viruses swap chunks ofRNA with each other. The latest analysis was presented at the 7th World One Health Congress in Singapore. The analysis shows that some parts of bat coronaviruses and SARS-CoV-2 shared a common ancestor three years before the virus appeared in people. The work has not been critiqued.
Researchers say the finding narrows the time between the emergence of the bats and the jump to people. An enduring mystery of the epidemic, which many scientists agree probably involved an animal, is not explained by this.
The study shows how hard it will be to find the direct ancestors of the coronaviruses in bats. The chances of finding a direct descendant are close to zero according to Edward. The ship has left.
The University of California, San Diego epidemiologist, who contributed to the latest analysis, said that the direct ancestor of the disease probably formed from several viruses. Sampling bats for coronaviruses could possibly identify viral fragments that are more closely related than those found in known coronaviruses, but probably won't reveal one direct ancestors.
Many researchers in southeast Asia have been analyzing the coronaviruses found in bats. They are trying to find the origin of the Pandemic virus by studying older tissue samples. Scientists have not been able to find a progenitor virus for the disease, which has led to speculation that the outbreak was caused by a virus that escaped from a research center in the city where the epidemic began. The laboratory has done work on coronaviruses.
Bats and pangolins have been isolated from a number of viruses related to the disease. Researchers compare their entire genomes to see if they have a link to the disease. The closest known relatives of SARS-CoV-2 are a bat virus in Laos called BANAL 52 and a virus in southern China called Ra TG13. There has been about 70 years of evolution since the common ancestor of the two viruses was shared.
The role of recombination in virus evolution is ignored. It is possible that some chunks ofRNA are different from others, suggesting a closer relationship.
The researchers compared 18 bat and pangolin viruses that were close to each other and created 27 segments. Each segment has a different evolutionary history according to the evolutionary virologist who presented the work in Singapore. For each segment, the researchers used a larger subset of related Viruses to estimate how recently a common Ancestor with a bat or animal Viruses was shared. The work will be submitted to a journal early next year after it was described in a post on the forum.
A few years ago, some segments shared a common ancestor with SARS- CoV-2. The majority of the fragments shared a common ancestor, but one small chunk, some 250 nucleotides long, could have shared a common ancestor in 2016 and another in 2015. The bats were from two countries. The analysis shows that southern China and southeast Asia are some of the places where the ancestors of the SARS-coV-2 are found.
The approach is a clever one according to the person. The signal of evolutionary time is given by it. The estimates are less reliable due to the fact that there are only a limited number ofRNAs to compare.
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