An international team of scientists from Japan, the US, Australia, and Belgium has detected a new Covid-19-like virus from a species of moustached bats in Brazil, stoking fears of a potential spillover and a new disease.Bats are natural reservoirs for many viruses, including betacoronaviruses- which include the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome virus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome virus (MERS-CoV).
The team from the universities of Osaka and Sydney detected the virus called BRZ batCoV from the Pteronotus parnellii- a small insect-eating bat known for tiny hair tufts on its face.
Even though the bat species is common in South America, experts fear the virus might have been gaining ground for months.
“We identified a full-length genome of a novel bat CoV (BRZ batCoV) from a Pteronotus parnellii bat sampled in Brazil that is phylogenetically distinct from known betacoronaviruses,” said the researchers, in a paper not yet peer-reviewed and published on pre-print site BioRxiv.
The team analysed the species’ evolutionary development and found that “the virus is sufficiently distinct from the five recognised Betacoronavirus subgenera to represent a new subgenus”.