Journal article

Discovery of bat coronaviruses through surveillance and probe capture-based next-generation sequencing

B Li, HR Si, Y Zhu, XL Yang, DE Anderson, ZL Shi, LF Wang, P Zhou

Msphere | Published : 2020

Open access

Abstract

Coronaviruses (CoVs) of bat origin have caused two pandemics in this century. Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)-CoV and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS)-CoV both originated from bats, and it is highly likely that bat coronaviruses will cause future outbreaks. Active surveillance is both urgent and essential to predict and mitigate the emergence of these viruses in humans. Next-generation sequencing (NGS) is currently the preferred methodology for virus discovery to ensure unbiased sequencing of bat CoVs, considering their high genetic diversity. However, unbiased NGS is an expensive methodology and is prone to missing low-abundance CoV sequences due to the high background level..

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University of Melbourne Researchers

Grants

Awarded by National Medical Research Council


Funding Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the China National Science and Technology Major Project on Infectious Diseases (grant number 2018ZX10305409-004-001 to P.Z.), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Excellent Young Scholars grants number 81822028 and 81661148058 to P.Z.), and the Strategic Priority Research Program of the CAS (grants number XDB29010204 to P.Z. and XDB29010101 to Z.-L.S.). The work conducted at Duke-NUS was supported in part by NRF grant numbers NRF2016NRFNSFC002-013 and NRF2012NRF-CRP001-056, CD-PHRG grant number CDPHRG/0006/2014, NMRC grant number ZRRF16006, and MINDEF grant number DIRP20159016102060 to L.-F.W. and D.E.A.