By Shreyanka Nandan
A new Chinese study came up of a new HKU5-CoV-2 coronavirus by a renowned Chinese virologist Shi Zhengli (Batwomen) after rigorous and extensive research at the Guangzhou Academy of Sciences, Wuhan University and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The research reported that this virus has the potential to infect humans as it has the same cell-surface protein to infiltrate cells as the Covid-19 (SARS-CoV-2). The researchers also suspect animal to human transmission in it, which extends the death threat more.
Apart from hundreds of coronaviruses in the wild only few persist in the power to infect humans. HKU5-CoV-2 traces from HKU5 coronavirus, first identified in the Japanese pipistrelle bat in Hong Kong, which comes from merbecovirus subgenus that includes the virus of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (Mers).
Like SARS-CoV-2 the bat virus HKU5-CoV-2 has a feature known as the furin cleavage that helps to enter in cells via the ACE2 receptor protein on cell surface as said by the scientists. They also examined monoclonal antibodies and antiviral drugs that target the bat virus. According to the lab experiments, HKU5-CoV-2 has the power to infect human cells with high ACE2 levels in test tubes and in models of human intestines and airways.
Virologist Shi Zhengli is popularly known as ‘batwomen’ because of her extensive in-depth knowledge research about bat coronaviruses. She is well known for her contribution at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was a common suspected epicentre of the pandemic 2020 as proclaimed. Though later, she has efficiently rejected this claim.
As per Chinese researchers, this new type of coronavirus will not enter the human body as easily as Covid-19 virus. The study says that the virus has less binding affinity to human ACE2 compared to Covid-19 and some other factors that human adaptation suggests is that the emergence risk in human population shouldn’t get exaggerated.
On the other side an expert from the Minnesota University, Michael Osterholm states the reaction to the study “overblown”. And he also added that, due to the presence of a lot of immunity in the population, the risk of a pandemic-like scenario is less.
Researchers from the University of Washington in Seattle and the University of Wuhan stated that although the HKU5 strain has the power to bind ACE2 receptors of bats and mammals, it does not have its efficiency.