A new coronavirus associated with human respiratory disease in China¶
Why this mattered¶
TBD
Abstract¶
Abstract Emerging infectious diseases, such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Zika virus disease, present a major threat to public health 1–3 . Despite intense research efforts, how, when and where new diseases appear are still a source of considerable uncertainty. A severe respiratory disease was recently reported in Wuhan, Hubei province, China. As of 25 January 2020, at least 1,975 cases had been reported since the first patient was hospitalized on 12 December 2019. Epidemiological investigations have suggested that the outbreak was associated with a seafood market in Wuhan. Here we study a single patient who was a worker at the market and who was admitted to the Central Hospital of Wuhan on 26 December 2019 while experiencing a severe respiratory syndrome that included fever, dizziness and a cough. Metagenomic RNA sequencing 4 of a sample of bronchoalveolar lavage fluid from the patient identified a new RNA virus strain from the family Coronaviridae , which is designated here ‘WH-Human 1’ coronavirus (and has also been referred to as ‘2019-nCoV’). Phylogenetic analysis of the complete viral genome (29,903 nucleotides) revealed that the virus was most closely related (89.1% nucleotide similarity) to a group of SARS-like coronaviruses (genus Betacoronavirus, subgenus Sarbecovirus) that had previously been found in bats in China 5 . This outbreak highlights the ongoing ability of viral spill-over from animals to cause severe disease in humans.
Related¶
- cite → The Sequence Alignment/Map format and SAMtools — The coronavirus genome study used SAMtools/SAM-format read alignment workflows to assemble and analyze sequencing data from patient samples.
- cite → A pneumonia outbreak associated with a new coronavirus of probable bat origin — Both papers identify SARS-CoV-2 as the causative agent of the Wuhan pneumonia outbreak and link it phylogenetically to bat coronaviruses.
- cite ← Cryo-EM structure of the 2019-nCoV spike in the prefusion conformation — The spike-structure paper uses the initial identification of the novel coronavirus as the basis for studying its spike glycoprotein.
- enables ← The Sequence Alignment/Map format and SAMtools — SAMtools provided the standard read-alignment and variant-processing infrastructure used to assemble and analyze sequencing data from the new coronavirus.