[Taxacom] source of the new coronavirus (of subgenus Sarbecovirus)

[Kenneth Kinman]

Hi All,
       An article in the New England Journal of Medicine (24 Jan. 2020) indicates that the primary host of the new coronavirus was probably a bat.  I did a BLAST search (NCBI) on the two bat coronaviruses (which are sister clade to the clade of the new coronavirus), and those two bat coronavirus sequences are 97.48% identical.  So the new coronavirus is perhaps about 90-95% identical to them.  SARS coronaviruses are about 84-87% identical to them.   They make up the subgenus Sarbecovirus (genus Betacoronavius).
       But how the virus got into humans is still being debated), most likely through an intermediate host such as snakes or civets.  Anyway, the first weblink below is the New England Journal of Medicine article (with cladogram for Sarbecovius and related subgenera).   The second weblink is to the 2018 paper "Genomic characterization and infectivity of a novel SARS-like coronavirus in Chinese bats").
                          ---------------Ken Kinman
P.S.  The MERS coronavirus is thought to have passed from bats to camels and then to humans.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2001017

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6135831/