The new crown virus shares key characteristics with the chrysanthemum bat coronavirus in Laos

Xinhua News Agency, London, September 19 (Reporter Guo Shuang) A study published recently on the Research Plaza, a preprint platform of the British journal Nature, showed the crowns carried by chrysanthemum bats that inhabit certain caves in northern Laos.
The virus and the new coronavirus share key characteristics, which indicates that there are viruses closely related to the new coronavirus in nature
.

In this new study, researchers from the Pasteur Institute in France and the University of Laos captured 46 species of 645 bats in the limestone "karst zone" in northern Laos between July 2020 and January 2021.
Sampling studies are carried out on whether the coronavirus carried by bats is similar to the new coronavirus
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Researchers have discovered that the receptor binding domain (RBD) of the new coronavirus spike protein invades the human body by binding to the human cell receptor "Angiotensin Converting Enzyme 2 (ACE2)"
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Whether the bat coronavirus that exists in nature can bind to the human cell receptor ACE2, and whether the virus has an RBD similar to the new coronavirus is an important basis for judging whether the bat coronavirus can spread across species

The paper shows that researchers collected samples from the above-mentioned chrysanthemum bats that inhabit some caves in northern Laos, and found three bat coronaviruses that are highly similar to the new coronavirus RBD in these samples
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The researchers pointed out that the viruses code-named BANAL-52, BANAL-103 and BANAL-236 are "the closest known to the new coronavirus to date" bat coronavirus

Previously, Western media claimed that the RaTG13 coronavirus is the closest to the new coronavirus
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However, new research shows that compared with the bat coronavirus RaTG13 found in Yunnan, the RBD of the three coronaviruses carried by the above-mentioned chrysanthemum bats is closer to the new coronavirus

Edward Holmes, a virology researcher at the University of Sydney in Australia who was not involved in the aforementioned research 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
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This study emphasizes that bat coronaviruses that exist in nature are highly susceptible to infecting humans, which is a clear risk for the future