Sarbecoviruses, a type of coronavirus, were discovered to be present in smaller horseshoe bats in the United Kingdom. Credit: Franz Christoph Robiller, ImageBROKER, and Shutterstock
The closest known relatives of SARS-CoV-2 are carried by wild bats in China and southeast Asia, where coronavirus hunters have concentrated their search for the next pandemic threats.
However, a survey of bat species in the UK suggests that researchers should broaden their search. New coronaviruses were discovered in the trawl, some of which belonged to the same group as SARS-CoV-2.
Although they are unlikely to spread in humans without further evolution, laboratory studies with safe versions of these viruses suggest that some of them share important adaptations with SARS-CoV-2.
SARS-CoV-2 is a member of the sarbecovirus family of coronaviruses, which are found in bats. However, prior to the pandemic, Asia was the focus of efforts to identify and classify these viruses. According to Vincent Savolainen, an evolutionary geneticist at Imperial College London who oversaw the study, which was published on June 27 in Nature Communications1,” Europe and the UK had been completely overlooked.”
In order to close this gap, Savolainen and his associates collaborated with organizations working on bat rehabilitation and conservation to gather 48 feces from bats from 16 of the 17 species that breed in the UK. Nine coronaviruses were discovered through genetic sequencing, including four sarbecovirus species and one associated with