Scientific Reports (Oct 2024)

Study on sentinel hosts for surveillance of future COVID-19-like outbreaks

  • Yanjiao Li,
  • Jingjing Hu,
  • Jingjing Hou,
  • Shuiping Lu,
  • Jiasheng Xiong,
  • Yuxi Wang,
  • Zhong Sun,
  • Weijie Chen,
  • Yue Pan,
  • Karuppiah Thilakavathy,
  • Yi Feng,
  • Qingwu Jiang,
  • Weibing Wang,
  • Chenglong Xiong

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-76506-7
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 14, no. 1
pp. 1 – 11

Abstract

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Abstract The spread of SARS-CoV-2 to animals has the potential to evolve independently. In this study, we distinguished several sentinel animal species and genera for monitoring the re-emergence of COVID-19 or the new outbreak of COVID-19-like disease. We analyzed SARS-CoV-2 genomic data from human and nonhuman mammals in the taxonomic hierarchies of species, genus, family and order of their host. We find that SARS-CoV-2 carried by domestic dog (Canis lupus familiaris), domestic cat (Felis catus), mink (Neovison vison), and white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) cluster closely to human-origin viruses and show no differences in the majority of amino acids, but have the most positively selected sites and should be monitored to prevent the re-emergence of COVID-19 caused by novel variants of SARS-CoV-2. Viruses from the genera Panthera (especially lion (Panthera leo)), Manis and Rhinolophus differ significantly from human-origin viruses, and long-term surveillance should be undertaken to prevent the future COVID-19-like outbreaks. Investigation of the variation dynamics of sites 142, 501, 655, 681 and 950 within the S protein may be necessary to predict the novel animal SARS-CoV-2 variants.

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