Wuhan laboratory adds another branch to bat coronavirus family tree
- Details of new lineage that contains distant relatives of the virus that causes Covid-19 suggest current discoveries may be the ‘tip of the iceberg’
- The facility has found itself at the centre of strongly denied claims about lab leaks
Researchers at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology have found a new branch in the family tree of bat coronaviruses.
The viruses, described in a preprint paper released last Friday, are more distantly related to the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 than several other known viruses, the researchers said, but have high levels of similarity across certain areas of the genome.
“These results suggested the [coronaviruses] we discovered from bats now may be just the tip of the iceberg,” the team wrote in the paper on the server bioRvix.
They also provide new insight into viruses stored by the institute.
The latest research examines eight viruses gathered during a 2015 visit to a town in the southwestern province of Yunnan, where researchers from the Wuhan institute (WIV) collected over 1,000 samples from bats in and around a mining cave over a three-year period.