Chinese researchers who spent 5 years examining SARS-related viruses collected from horseshoe bats in a Yunnan province cave found 11 new strains that have all the genetic building blocks of the strain that has infected humans, hinting that recombination between the bats' viral strains may have produced the ancestor of the deadly outbreak.
Experiments showed that some of the newly identified strains can enter human cells using the same cell receptor as the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) virus. The team reported its findings yesterday in PLoS Pathogens.
The epidemic began in 2002 in southern China, and over the next year it involved nearly 8,100 cases, 774 of them fatal, in 37 countries. Researchers have traced the source of the virus to horseshoe bats, with palm civets as the intermediate host. However, earlier gene studies have shown that SARS strains in bats are distinct from strain that triggered the human outbreak, obscuring a clear understanding of how the outbreak started.=read more
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