Absence of MERS-CoV antibodies in feral camels in Australia: Implications for the pathogen's origin and spread

Crameri, Gary; Durr, Peter A.; Barr, Jennifer; Yu, Meng; Graham, Kerryne; Williams, Owen J.; Kayali, Ghazi; Smith, David; Peiris, Malik; Mackenzie, John S.; Wang, Lin-Fa

The bat species (T. hilli) with a home that overlaps the central Australian camel distribution occupies a comparatively large area and occurs in an area of high camel density. As it is related to the species (Taphozous perforatus) from which a sequence almost identical to that of the index case of MERS-CoV was isolated in Saudi Arabia in 2012 [36] , T. hilli would seem to be the priority for virological sampling. However, the sequence obtained from T. perfortatus was a single, short sequence (203 nucleotides), has not been independently confirmed and no actual isolate has subsequently been obtained [6] . By contrast, a virus from a species which occurs throughout east and southern Africa (Neoromicia capensis) has yielded a full genome sequence, which despite having less identity with MERS-CoV and not occurring in the Arabian Peninsula, is considered a more plausible natural reservoir [6] . As this species occurs within the family Vestpertilionidae, from which the majority of the lineage C β-CoV isolates have been obtained (Table 3) , it is recommended that virological sampling of the Australian Vestpertilionidae species which occur to the north of the current camel distribution (Fig. 2 ) also be undertaken. With the recent advance of multiple serological profiling tools using a synthetic virome epitope library [37] , it is theoretically feasible to examine total infection profiles of both bats and camels in the overlapped geographical locations. Such inter-species serological comparison will undoubtedly shed new light on the real risk and occurrence of spill-over events happening between these two groups of wildlife animals.