They offer more than seafood at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China. For years raccoon dogs, a relative of the fox, have actually been cost the marketplace for meat and fur. And that animal has actually been recognized as the most likely to have actually passed SARS-CoV-2 to people, the infection that triggers COVID-19.
“When SARS-2 first jumped into humans, there was a lot of speculation about what the ‘intermediate host’ could be. Civets, pangolins. Maybe bats. But raccoon dogs were always top of the list for those of us who’ve been following this carefully,” said Joel Wertheim, a teacher of medication and evolutionary biologist at UC San Diego.
Wertheim is among an international group of researchers who released a report recently that said the very best description of the COVID-19 pandemic’s origin is that it was passed to a human by a raccoon dog, discovered in among the stalls in the Wuhan market.
“These data show a co-occurrence of genetic material from a raccoon dog and SARS-CoV-2,” Wertheim said. “They don’t prove unambiguously that (the) raccoon dog was infected with SARS-COv-2, but this is exactly what you would expect to find if a raccoon dog were infected with the virus.”
Wertheim explained that a person of his coworkers, an Australian researcher, took an image of raccoon dogs in cages at the Wuhan market. One of them was stacked on top of other cages holding birds. The most effective proof was, naturally, genes.
Another co-author of the report is Niema Moshiri, a computer technology teacher at UCSD. He said detectives needed to arrange through great deals of various DNA left at the marketplace stalls.
“If you have a stall in the market, you’re going to have some animal DNA from whatever animal was held in that stall. You’re going to have DNA from feces or other matter from other animals nearby. You’re going to have some human DNA because somebody’s hair fell in the sample,” Moshiri said.
He said gene sequencing makers needed to analyze lots of DNA pieces that may be pertinent.
“And when you overlay this with information that they already had about which stall was either COVID positive or COVID negative, what animals do you find in the stalls they determined were COVID positive?” Moshiri said.
Wertheim said their research study revealed there were most likely 2 family trees of COVID-19 infection at the marketplace, indicating the infection leapt to people not as soon as however two times. They think the one including the raccoon dog blew up into a pandemic.
Some U.S. firms have actually recommended that the COVID-19 pandemic arised from a “lab leak” in Wuhan. Wertheim said the information informs a various story.
“The data don’t support any of those origin hypotheses, out of a lab. And in fact the findings in our recent report are exactly what you would expect under a natural zoonotic origin of SARS COv-2,” Wertheim said.
Zoonotic implies moving from one types to another, in this case, most likely from a raccoon dog to an individual.
