RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 Discovery of a novel coronavirus associated with the recent pneumonia outbreak in humans and its potential bat origin JF bioRxiv FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory SP 2020.01.22.914952 DO 10.1101/2020.01.22.914952 A1 Peng Zhou A1 Xing-Lou Yang A1 Xian-Guang Wang A1 Ben Hu A1 Lei Zhang A1 Wei Zhang A1 Hao-Rui Si A1 Yan Zhu A1 Bei Li A1 Chao-Lin Huang A1 Hui-Dong Chen A1 Jing Chen A1 Yun Luo A1 Hua Guo A1 Ren-Di Jiang A1 Mei-Qin Liu A1 Ying Chen A1 Xu-Rui Shen A1 Xi Wang A1 Xiao-Shuang Zheng A1 Kai Zhao A1 Quan-Jiao Chen A1 Fei Deng A1 Lin-Lin Liu A1 Bing Yan A1 Fa-Xian Zhan A1 Yan-Yi Wang A1 Geng-Fu Xiao A1 Zheng-Li Shi YR 2020 UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/01/23/2020.01.22.914952.abstract AB Since the SARS outbreak 18 years ago, a large number of severe acute respiratory syndrome related coronaviruses (SARSr-CoV) have been discovered in their natural reservoir host, bats1-4. Previous studies indicated that some of those bat SARSr-CoVs have the potential to infect humans5-7. Here we report the identification and characterization of a novel coronavirus (nCoV-2019) which caused an epidemic of acute respiratory syndrome in humans, in Wuhan, China. The epidemic, started from December 12th, 2019, has caused 198 laboratory confirmed infections with three fatal cases by January 20th, 2020. Full-length genome sequences were obtained from five patients at the early stage of the outbreak. They are almost identical to each other and share 79.5% sequence identify to SARS-CoV. Furthermore, it was found that nCoV-2019 is 96% identical at the whole genome level to a bat coronavirus. The pairwise protein sequence analysis of seven conserved non-structural proteins show that this virus belongs to the species of SARSr-CoV. The nCoV-2019 virus was then isolated from the bronchoalveolar lavage fluid of a critically ill patient, which can be neutralized by sera from several patients. Importantly, we have confirmed that this novel CoV uses the same cell entry receptor, ACE2, as SARS-CoV.