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Analysis points out SARS may come from bats

Posted Feb 20, 2008 at 09:26PM by Ceasar S. Listed in: Animals and Wildlife, Diseases, Genetics Tags: Ohio State University, Genome, SARS
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Analysis points out SARS may come from bats - Image 1


Researchers have been studying the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) virus' genome with a steady eye and have discovered that bats, Earth's flying furry critters, could've been its source. A thorough analysis was used to trace the virus' evolutionary path all the way back, and scientists are now sure that the SARS virus doesn't come from the now-hunted Chinese civet cats.

Daniel Janies, lead author of the study and an assistant professor of biomedical informatics at Ohio State University, revealed that they've made several comparisons to other known viruses and their sources. According to their results, a virus prevalent in bats exhibited the most promising indications in relation to the SARS strain they've been studying.

"With the data at hand, we see how the virus used different hosts, moving from bat to human to civet, in that order," says Janies.

Yes, that order, indeed. Contrary to the claims of Chinese authorities, the SARS virus they discovered within civet cats did not move from cat to human. Janies says that it was the human that infected the cat, and adds:

The real story is that civets were not the animal reservoir of SARS. But it’s a messy story. Bats harbor a strain of SARS that is our best example of the virus before it infected humans – but we still see missing links in the history of the transfers of SARS from animals to humans because we don’t know that much about coronavirus (SARS-CoV) diversity.


So the evolutionary path is not 100% sure, but then there's a lot of uncertainties when it comes to non-living cells infecting living cells. The study has been published in the scientific journal Cladistics, however, and studies will continue to map out the bat to human infection path.

[Via Ohio State University] Permalink  |   Email this  |   Linking Blogs   |   Digg It!

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