Back

Computational analysis suggests putative intermediate animal hosts of the SARS-CoV-2

Chu, P.; Zhou, Z.; Gao, Z.; Cai, R.; Wu, S.; Sun, Z.; Chen, S.; Yang, Y.

2020-04-05 bioinformatics
10.1101/2020.04.04.025080 bioRxiv
Show abstract

The recent emerged SARS-CoV-2 may first transmit to intermediate animal host from bats before the spread to humans. The receptor recognition of ACE2 protein by SARS-CoVs or bat-originated coronaviruses is one of the most important determinant factors for the cross-species transmission and human-to-human transmission. To explore the hypothesis of possible intermediate animal host, we employed molecular dynamics simulation and free energy calculation to examine the binding of bat coronavirus with ACE2 proteins of 47 representing animal species collected from public databases. Our results suggest that intermediate animal host may exist for the zoonotic transmission of SARS-CoV-2. Furthermore, we found that tree shrew and ferret may be two putative intermediate hosts for the zoonotic spread of SARS-CoV-2. Collectively, the continuous surveillance of pneumonia in human and suspicious animal hosts are crucial to control the zoonotic transmission events caused by SARS-CoV-2.

Matching journals

The top 9 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.