PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Matthew C. Wong
AU  - Sara J. Javornik Cregeen
AU  - Nadim J. Ajami
AU  - Joseph F. Petrosino
TI  - Evidence of recombination in coronaviruses implicating pangolin origins of nCoV-2019
AID  - 10.1101/2020.02.07.939207
DP  - 2020 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2020.02.07.939207
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/02/13/2020.02.07.939207.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/02/13/2020.02.07.939207.full
AB  - A novel coronavirus (nCoV-2019) was the cause of an outbreak of respiratory illness detected in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China in December of 2019. Genomic analyses of nCoV-2019 determined a 96% resemblance with a coronavirus isolated from a bat in 2013 (RaTG13); however, the receptor binding motif (RBM) of these two genomes share low sequence similarity. This divergence suggests a possible alternative source for the RBM coding sequence in nCoV-2019. We identified high sequence similarity in the RBM between nCoV-2019 and a coronavirus genome reconstructed from a viral metagenomic dataset from pangolins possibly indicating a more complex origin for nCoV-2019.