What Have We Learned About Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus Emergence in Humans? A Systematic Literature Review

Dawson, Patrick; Malik, Mamunur Rahman; Parvez, Faruque; Morse, Stephen S.

One study, from analysis of an S1 subunit in its spike gene, suggested that MERS-CoV may have arisen from intraspike recombination between two ancestral coronaviruses . The virus has not been isolated from a bat, although a portion of MERS-CoV RNA sequence apparently was identified in a bat (the insectivorous bat Taphozous perforatus, the Egyptian tomb bat) in Saudi Arabia in the same site as an early human case (100% nucleotide match, although this was only *180 nucleotides in the relatively well-conserved RdRp region) (Memish et al. 2013a) . MERS-like coronaviruses, including the closely related HKU4, which also uses a DPP4 receptor, and HKU5, first identified by Woo et al. in 2006 (Woo et al. 2006 , Matthews et al. 2014 , and others have been identified in bat species in China (Matthews et al. 2014 , Mexico (Anthony et al. 2013) , South Africa (Ithete et al. 2013 , Corman et al. 2014a , and Uganda ).