Evolutionary origins of epidemic potential among human RNA viruses

Lu Lu; Liam Brierley; Gail Robertson; Feifei Zhang; Samantha Lycett; Donald Smith; Margo Chase-Topping; Peter Simmonds; Mark Woolhouse

The absence of a clear association between human infectivity and human transmissibility may 208 reflect the key role that cell receptors play in determining a virus's capacity to infect and be 209 transmitted by humans 16, 18 . Cell receptor usage varies between virus genera and sometimes Our study supports a recent proposal for a large-scale survey of viral diversity in non-human 217 reservoirs, the Global Virome Project (GVP) 11 . Though this idea is controversial and would be 218 costly to implement 19 , its relevance is underlined by our finding that most species of human-219 transmissible viruses (L3/4) evolve from mammal/bird RNA virus lineages not known to be 220 infective to humans (L1), coupled with the expectation that the great majority of mammal and 221 bird viruses are still unrecognised 12 . We note recent progress in using machine learning to 222 predict host range from sequence data 20 and the potential of this kind of approach to help 223 identify human-infective and human-transmissible viruses even in the absence of human cases.