New genetic clues link the origin of Covid-19 to bats

• Direct Last minute on the coronavirus

• Health They find a virus very similar to that of Covid-19 in bats in Laos

• Coronavirus The WHO raises a new hypothesis about the origin of Covid: contact between a bat and a laboratory researcher

The journal

has just published a French study that supports the hypothesis that the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, which causes the Covid-19 infection and a pandemic that has so far caused the death of around 5.8 million people. across the planet,

.

Researchers from the Pasteur Institute in Paris describe in this work (

) coronaviruses genetically similar to SARS-CoV-2 and identified within bat populations in northern Laos.

The study suggests that

.

Marc Eloit and his colleagues, from the Pasteur Institute, have analyzed a sample of

(belonging to 6 families and 46 species) that live in caves in northern Laos and have specifically found in them

.

The authors describe that the genetic sequences encoding the ACE2 binding regions in the new viruses are similar to those of SARS-CoV-2;

ACE2 is a human cell receptor that SARS-CoV-2 uses to enter cells.

Bat viruses can bind to human ACE2 receptors more efficiently than the original SARS-CoV-2 strain isolated from humans.

They have also observed that one of these viruses replicates within human cell lines but is inhibited by antibodies that neutralize SARS-CoV-2.

The "most likely scenario" for the WHO

It should be remembered that on March 31, 2021, the WHO published its final report on the mission in China to discover the origins of SARS-CoV-2, in which it concluded that

.

He also described the theory that it escaped from a laboratory as "extremely unlikely", assuring that the virus was not circulating in Wuhan, China (the epicenter city of the pandemic and where the headquarters of the Wuhan Institute of Virology is, which investigates with various types of coronavirus), before December 2019.

However, the director general of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, declared then that, as far as this organization is concerned, "

. This report is a very important beginning, but it is not the end. We have not found the origin of the virus, and we must continue to follow the science and leave no stone unturned as we do so."

In fact, the WHO report presents

, without ruling out any of them completely: it is "possible or probable" that the origin has been a direct contagion from an animal to a human;

it is "likely or very likely" that there was an intermediary animal between an infected animal and humans;

it is "possible" that the virus reached humans through food products, and it is "extremely unlikely" that the virus reached humans due to an incident in a laboratory.

Jordi Serra Cobo, professor at the Department of Evolutionary Biology, Ecology and Environmental Sciences and at the Biodiversity Research Institute of the University of Barcelona (UB) and a reference in coronavirus, in statements to this newspaper at the beginning of the pandemic (in April 2020) said: "The certainty we have is that the virus has an animal origin. The epidemic manifested itself in Wuhan but at the moment we do not have enough information about the initial infection to determine its origin with certainty."

And he added: "

.

Now, we do not know what the intermediate species is;

it may have been the food consumption of the intermediate species.

The SARS-CoV epidemic was caused by the consumption of the civet, a mammal the size of a wild cat.

It is an animal that is highly appreciated gastronomically, which is displayed alive in restaurants so that diners can choose the specimen they want to eat."

Today, after reading the new article in

, he explained that "I know the team from the Pasteur Institute that has participated in this research, I have even worked with some of them on European projects.

. Southeast Asia is one of epidemiologically speaking hot regions, where a great diversity of viruses is concentrated, including coronaviruses.In an article published by Souilmi et al. in 2021 in the journal

, the authors found genes that interact in the human population of Southeast Asia with coronaviruses for about 20,000 years.This is consistent with the findings of Marc Eloit's team and with the designation of

in this region.

."

Direct transmission from bat to human?

Serra-Cobo also reports that betacoronaviruses are a genus of coronaviruses that includes SARS and that, it seems, their origin is in bats.

However, he assures, "direct transmission of a coronavirus from a bat to a human has never been observed."

"In this sense, the fact

. Taking into account that the human-bat interaction is relatively small, there may be an intermediate species that is closest to human activity and that is the transmitter. In any case, it should be taken into account that biological compatibility to infect our cells is not a sufficient factor for an epidemic to occur. It is important that there is an amplification and subsequent spread of the pathogen, anthropogenic factors that are closely related to our activity," he concludes.

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