Journal
INFECTION GENETICS AND EVOLUTION
Volume 84, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
ELSEVIER
DOI: 10.1016/j.meegid.2020.104493
Keywords
COVID-19; SARS-CoV-2; Coronavirus; Pangolin; Zoonosis; Zoonotic model
Categories
Funding
- IHU Mediterranee Infection in France
- University of Marseille in France
- CNRS in France
- CIRAD in France
- University of Barcelona in Spain
- Xiamen University in P.R. China
- Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation [INV-005834]
- Science and Technology Program of Fujian Province [2020Y0002]
- Xiamen New Coronavirus Prevention and Control Emergency Tackling Special Topic Program [3502Z2020YJ03]
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The emergence of COVID-19 has triggered many works aiming at identifying the animal intermediate potentially involved in the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 to humans. The presence of SARS-CoV-2-related viruses in Malayan pangolins, in silico analysis of the ACE2 receptor polymorphism and sequence similarities between the Receptor Binding Domain (RBD) of the spike proteins of pangolin and human Sarbecoviruses led to the proposal of pangolin as intermediary. However, the binding affinity of the pangolin ACE2 receptor for SARS-CoV-2 RBD was later on reported to be low. Here, we provide evidence that the pangolin is not the intermediate animal at the origin of the human pandemic. Moreover, data available do not fit with the spillover model currently proposed for zoonotic emergence which is thus unlikely to account for this outbreak. We propose a different model to explain how SARS-CoV-2 related coronaviruses could have circulated in different species, including humans, before the emergence of COVID-19.
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