Journal article

Serological evidence of MERS-CoV and HKU8-related CoV co-infection in Kenyan camels

W Zhang, XS Zheng, B Agwanda, S Ommeh, K Zhao, J Lichoti, N Wang, J Chen, B Li, XL Yang, S Mani, KJ Ngeiywa, Y Zhu, B Hu, SO Onyuok, B Yan, DE Anderson, LF Wang, P Zhou, ZL Shi

Emerging Microbes and Infections | TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD | Published : 2019

Abstract

Dromedary camels are important reservoir hosts of various coronaviruses, including Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) that cause human infections. CoV genomes regularly undergo recombination during infection as observed in bat SARS-related CoVs. Here we report for the first time that only a small proportion of MERS-CoV receptor-binding domain positive (RBD) of spike protein positive camel sera in Kenya were also seropositive to MERS-CoV nucleocapsid (NP). In contrast, many of them contain antibodies against bat HKU8-related (HKU8r)-CoVs. Among 584 camel samples that were positive against MERS-CoV RBD, we found only 0.48 (8.22%) samples were also positive for NP. Furtherm..

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University of Melbourne Researchers

Grants

Awarded by National Medical Research Council


Funding Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant numbers: Excellent Young Scholars 81822028 and 81661148058] to PZ, Strategic Priority Research Program of the CAS [grant numbers XDB29010101 to ZLS and XDB29010204 to PZ]. The National Science and Technology Major Project [grant number 2018ZX10101004] to XLY, Sino-Africa Joint Research Center [grant number SAJC201605] to ZLS. The work conducted at Duke-NUS was supported in part by NRF grants NRF2016NRF-NSFC002-013 and NRF2012NRF-CRP001056, CD-PHRG grant CDPHRG/0006/2014, NMRC grant ZRRF16006 and MINDEF grant DIRP2015-9016102060 to L-FW.