NEW STUDY HINTS PANGOLINS MAY HAVE INCUBATED CORONAVIRUS

Dr. Elena Giorgi of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US says people had already looked into the pangolin link with the SARS-COV2 virus but scientists are still divided about their role in the evolution of the virus, Sputnik reported on May 31, 2020.

Scientists claim to have found more clues about how the new coronavirus could have spread from bats through pangolins and into humans. But they said it's too soon to blame pangolins for the pandemic and suggest a third species of animal may have played host to the virus before it spilled over to people.

Writing in the journal Science Advances,  researchers from Duke University and the Los Alamos National Laboratory said an examination of the closest relative of the virus found that it was circulating in bats but lacked the protein needed to bind to human cells. They said this ability could have been acquired from a virus found in pangolins – a scaly mammal that is one of the most illegally trafficked animals in the world.

The team analyzed 43 complete genomes from three strains of coronaviruses that infect bats and pangolins and that resemble the new COVID-19 virus. "In our study, we demonstrated that indeed SARS-COV-2 has a rich evolutionary history that included a reshuffling of genetic material between bat and pangolin coronavirus before it acquired its ability to jump to humans", said Elena Giorgi, a staff scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory who worked on the study. But their findings may let pangolins off the hook. The animals, also known as scaly anteaters, are sold as food in many countries, including China, and have been a prime suspect as a possible source of the pandemic. "The currently sampled pangolin coronaviruses are too divergent from SARS-COV-2 to be its recent progenitors", the researchers wrote.