The New Age of Virus Discovery: Genomic Analysis of a Novel Human Betacoronavirus Isolated from a Fatal Case of Pneumonia

Holmes, Kathryn V.; Dominguez, Samuel R.

In June 2012, a novel coronavirus, tentatively named HCoV-EMC (for Erasmus Medical Center where the initial genome sequence was done), was isolated in a monkey kidney cell line from a sputum specimen from a 60-year-old man from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia who died of acute severe pneumonia and renal failure. Results of standard diagnostic tests of his clinical samples for known respiratory viruses were all negative, which prompted testing of infected cell culture supernatants using a pan-coronavirus reverse transcription-PCR (RT-PCR) assay to amplify a short, highly conserved region of the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase gene. Sequencing the amplicon from the patient's specimen revealed the novel human coronavirus (4) . The discovery of a new coronavirus in a patient who died of severe respiratory disease was promptly reported to the World Health Organization and posted on ProMed to alert physicians and diagnostic laboratories to look for additional cases. Eight additional patients from the Middle East with HCoV-EMC infection and severe respiratory disease have been identified, bringing the total of laboratory-confirmed cases up to 9, with 5 deaths (5). In a recent article, van Boheemen et al. described the characterization of the HCoV-EMC genome using unbiased high-throughput next-generation sequencing and state-of-the-art bioinformatics to mine a wealth of information about this new human virus (6) .