2019_nCoV/SARS-CoV-2: rapid classification of betacoronaviruses and identification of Traditional Chinese Medicine as potential origin of zoonotic coronaviruses

Wassenaar, T.M.; Zou, Y.

Of an extensive list of bat species that historically have been used in TCM (Riccucci 2012) , five were found to carry coronaviruses, as reported in a surveillance study (Tang et al. 2006) : Pipistrellus abramus, Murina leucogaster, Rhinolophus ferrumequinum, Scotophilus kuhlii and Scotomanes ornatus. Of these bat species, the first three can be found in the province of Hubei (source: www. iucnredlist.org); the habitat of S. ornatus reaches to the south of the province but does not cover the Wuhan area, while S. kuhlii is not endemic in this region. A number of whole genome Sarbecovirus sequences isolated from these bats and other bat species were selected and their 5'-flank was compared to that of 2019_nCoV (Fig. 2) . This produced the highest identity to the same isolate that Lu and coworkers had identified (Lu et al. 2020) , demonstrating that an analysis of 253 nucleotides directly upstream of the start codon of the polycystronic messenger suffices to identify genetic relationships between Sarbecovirus species.