In a series of editorials, we look back at key scientific findings that have revealed important characteristics of the virus and COVID-19, including emerging approaches to treatment and prevention. We begin, this week, with how the virus was identified; the molecular details of its mechanism of infection; how it transmits between people; and the many ways in which it affects the human body.
Cracking the virus code
When an outbreak of a disease similar to severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) emerged in Wuhan, China, at the end of 2019, researchers suspected that a new coronavirus had spread to humans. Many of the first cases to be identified were linked to a single live-animal market in the city.
Researchers in China immediately began working to isolate and sequence the virus. When the original SARS virus, now known as SARS-CoV-1, emerged in humans in 2002, it took months to obtain a full sequence of the virus genome. This time, advances in sequencing technologies meant that scientists were able to unpick the virus’s RNA code within weeks of the first cases appearing.
On 11 January, Yong-Zhen Zhang at Fudan University in Shanghai and his colleagues deposited the genome sequence of a virus isolated from a 41-year-old who had worked at the animal market into a public database. In doing so, they alerted the world to the existence of a new coronavirus that was related to SARS-CoV-1. Their findings were subsequently published in Nature1.
Although Zhang’s team had sequenced the virus from only a single patient, simultaneous work by other groups identified the same virus from other people with pneumonia. Together, these researchers firmly implicated this new coronavirus as the cause of the disease. One of the teams, led by Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, also determined that the closest known relative of the new virus was a bat coronavirus2.