3 years in, COVID-19 may still be able to spread from humans back into bats
Embargoed until:
Publicly released:
2022-11-02 11:01
US scientists say the SARS-CoV-2 virus may still be able to spread from humans to other mammals, including back into the bats we think it came from, despite three years of changes as it evolved as a parasite of humans. They used computer models of the virus to investigate this because spreading the actual virus between mammalian hosts in a lab could be potentially dangerous. Their simulations suggest that while evolution has tailored the virus to its human hosts to some degree, potential spread between different species of mammals is still possible more than three years after the original spread from bats to humans.
Journal/conference: Royal Society Open Science
Link to research (DOI): 10.1098/rsos.220600
Organisation/s: Rochester Institute of Technology, USA
Funder: The authors received no funding for this study.
Media release
From: The Royal Society
Persistent cross-species SARS-CoV-2 variant infectivity predicted via comparative molecular dynamics simulation
The ability of SARS-CoV-2 virus to continue move between human and other mammal populations has been sporadically documented, but not systematically analyzed. Wet lab experiments along these lines would be potentially dangerous, however computer-based simulations of viral-host protein binding interactions can be safely studied to infer cross-species infectivity. Here, we explore whether the evolving human variants of concern arising during the pandemic can easily re-infect the bats from which they originally came. We demonstrate that while some viral specificity to humans has evolved, potential cross-mammalian infectivity has persisted more than 3 years after the original spillover from bats to humans.
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