Just to be clear our first post on Jan 22nd was to highlight there’s no evidence the new human lineage nCoV was recombinant, rather the, at that time, known to be related bat coronaviruses are clearly the recombinants. Since then a pre-print has come out from Wuhan-based researchers with senior author Zheng-Li Shi: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.22.914952v1 including a similarity plot. In this very important study Zhou et al. report a closer bat coronavirus to the nCoV lineage, RaTG13, in all of its genome confirming the nCoV lineage is not recombinant. The bat coronaviruses are themselves recorded to be frequently recombinant in the published literature so while interesting this is not a new finding. Update, Zhou et al’s paper is now available in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2012-7.
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