As Covid-19 is wreaking havoc in all nooks of the world with its deadly killing spree, a team of researchers at the University of East Anglia, ZSL (Zoological Society of London), and Public Health England (PHE) have discovered another variant of coronavirus which is very much related to the virus that infects humans. The new virus has been discovered in British horseshoe bats.
Will it mutate and start infecting humans?
Researchers detected this virus after analyzing fecal samples from more than 50 lesser horseshoe bats in Somerset, Gloucestershire, and Wales. The samples were later sent for testing at PHE, where researchers confirmed the presence of a novel coronavirus in one of the bat samples named RhGB01.
However, until now, there is no evidence that this virus could be transmitted from these bats to humans. But researchers believe that a mutation of this virus could make humans more vulnerable to getting infected.
According to researchers who took part in the study, these bats might be harboring this virus for quite a long time, and it has been detected now because of the tests carried out.
Prof Andrew Cunningham, from the Zoological Society of London, asserted that this virus detected in bats currently does not have the capability to infect humans. However, he did not rule out the possibility of this particular coronavirus undergo mutation in the future and start infecting human beings.
"This UK virus is not a threat to humans because the receptor-binding domain (RBD) - the part of the virus that attaches to host cells to infect them - is not compatible with being able to infect human cells. But the problem is that any bat harboring a SARS-like coronavirus can act as a melting pot for virus mutation," said Cunningham.
Coronavirus: Seek and you will find it
"Horseshoe bats are found across Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia, and the bats we tested lie at the western extreme of their range. Similar viruses have been found in other horseshoe bat species in China, South East Asia, and Eastern Europe. Our research extends both the geographic and species ranges of these types of viruses and suggests their more widespread presence across more than 90 species of horseshoe bats," said Professor Diana Bell, an expert in emerging zoonotic diseases from UEA's School of Biological Sciences, Eurekalert.org reports.
She also made it clear that such viruses are there among mammals for a long time, and the only way to detect it by seeking them.
Diana added, "These bats will almost certainly have harbored this virus for a very long time - probably many thousands of years. We didn't know about it before because this is the first time that such tests have been carried out in UK bats. We already know that there are different coronaviruses in many other mammal species too. This is a case of 'seek and you will find'.
