A Genome Sequence of Novel SARS-CoV Isolates: the Genotype, GD-Ins29, Leads to a Hypothesis of Viral Transmission in South China

Qin, E’de; He, Xionglei; Tian, Wei; Liu, Yong; Li, Wei; Wen, Jie; Wang, Jingqiang; Fan, Baochang; Wu, Qingfa; Chang, Guohui; Cao, Wuchun; Xu, Zuyuan; Yang, Ruifu; Wang, Jing; Yu, Man; Li, Yan; Xu, Jing; Si, Bingyin; Hu, Yongwu; Peng, Wenming; Tang, Lin; Jiang, Tao; Shi, Jianping; Ji, Jia; Zhang, Yu; Ye, Jia; Wang, Cui’e; Han, Yujun; Zhou, Jun; Deng, Yajun; Li, Xiaoyu; Hu, Jianfei; Wang, Caiping; Yan, Chunxia; Zhang, Qingrun; Bao, Jingyue; Li, Guoqing; Chen, Weijun; Fang, Lin; Li, Changfeng; Lei, Meng; Li, Dawei; Tong, Wei; Tian, Xiangjun; Wang, Jin; Zhang, Bo; Zhang, Haiqing; Zhang, Yilin; Zhao, Hui; Zhang, Xiaowei; Li, Shuangli; Cheng, Xiaojie; Zhang, Xiuqing; Liu, Bin; Zeng, Changqing; Li, Songgang; Tan, Xuehai; Liu, Siqi; Dong, Wei; Wang, Jun; Wong, Gane Ka-Shu; Yu, Jun; Wang, Jian; Zhu, Qingyu; Yang, Huanming

Since the virus is propagated within the cytosol, only the host sequences, such as processed transcripts, mRNAs and other operational RNAs, would have possibilities directly interacting with the viral host-dependent cellular processes, such as replication of the viral genome via a negative sense RNA intermediates, transcription of genes encoding viral replicase and structural proteins, and, to a limited extent, translation, if the interfering sequences enabling strand-annealing with viral RNA products. The unique 17-nt sequence that we have discovered from the human genome as mRNA forms is thought to be capable of annealing specifically with the negative sense strand of the viral RNA while the virus is replicating its RNA genomes from the negative sense RNA genome intermediates and transcribing viral transcripts for the replicase and structural proteins, thus interfere with the viral life cycle by reducing the efficiency of both viral replication and transcription. The prerequisite for the interference to happen is that the 17-nt sequence comes from a protein or RNA coding sequence that exists in infected human cells with reasonable abundance. It is very suggestive that the interaction of the intermediate viral genome products, namely the negative sense RNAs, and the host RNA species might have happened in the propagation processes within a host of SARS-CoV, through intermolecular RNA-RNA recombination (8).