Global patterns in coronavirus diversity

Anthony, Simon J.; Johnson, Christine K.; Greig, Denise J.; Kramer, Sarah; Che, Xiaoyu; Wells, Heather; Hicks, Allison L.; Joly, Damien O.; Wolfe, Nathan D.; Daszak, Peter; Karesh, William; Lipkin, W. I.; Morse, Stephen S.; Mazet, Jonna A. K.; Goldstein, Tracey

To predict where this unknown diversity is likely to be, we plotted the known distribution of all bat families associated with each CoV sub-clade. The 2b SARS clade was associated with rhinolophid and hipposiderid bats, so we plotted the distribution of all bat species belonging to these families to generate a map of viral diversity (richness). Based on this map, we would expect the greatest diversity of unknown 2b viruses to be found in South East Asia, which is consistent with previous studies describing 2b viruses in bats, but also in isolated pockets throughout Africa. In contrast, the 2c MERS clade was associated with vespertilionid bats, predicting that 2c diversity will be highest in Mexico, Europe, Central and South East Africa, and parts of South East Asia. Again, this is consistent with the distribution of 2c viruses reported here, and previously in the literature (Woo et al. 2007; Reusken et al. 2010; Anthony et al. 2012; Lelli et al. 2013; Corman et al. 2014a,b; Anthony et al. 2017 ) .