Coronaviruses and bats have been evolving together for millions of years

 Bats do a lot of good for the world -- they pollinate plants, they eat disease-carrying insects, and they help disperse seeds that help with the regeneration of tropical forest trees. Bats and a range of other mammal groups are also natural carriers of coronaviruses. To better understand this very diverse family of viruses, which includes the specific coronavirus behind COVID-19, scientists compared the different kinds of coronaviruses living in 36 bat species from the western Indian Ocean and nearby areas of Africa. They found that different groups of bats at the genus and in some cases family level had their own unique strains of coronavirus, revealing that bats and coronaviruses have been evolving together for millions of years.

"We found that there's a deep evolutionary history between bats and coronaviruses," says Steve Goodman, MacArthur Field Biologist at Chicago's Field Museum and an author of a paper just released in Scientific Reports detailing the discovery. "Developing a better understanding of how coronaviruses evolved can help us build public health programs in the future." The study was led by Université de La Réunion scientists Léa Joffrin and Camille Lebarbenchon, who conducted the genetic analyses in the laboratory of "Processus infectieux en milieu insulaire tropical (PIMIT)" on Réunion Island, focusing on emerging infectious diseases on islands in the western Indian Ocean.

A lot of people use "coronavirus" as a synonym for "COVID-19," the kind of coronavirus causing the current pandemic. However, there are a vast number of types of different coronaviruses, potentially as many as bat species, and most of them are unknown to be transferred to humans and pose no known threat. The coronaviruses carried by the bats studied in this paper are different from the one behind COVID-19, but by learning about coronaviruses in bats in general, we can better understand the virus affecting us today.

All animals have viruses that live inside them, and bats, as well as a range of other mammal groups, happen to be natural carriers of coronaviruses. These coronaviruses don't appear to be harmful to the bats, but there's potential for them to be dangerous to other animals if the viruses have opportunities to jump between species. This study examines the genetic relationships between different strains of coronaviruses and the animals they live in, which sets the stage for a better understanding of the transfer of viruses from animals to humans.

source:science daily