Over the latest several decades, no emerging virus has had a profound impact on the world as the SARS-CoV-2 emerged at the end of 2019 has done. To know where SARS-CoV-2 is originated from and how it jumped into human population, we immediately started a surveillance investigation in wild mammals in and around Wuhan when we determined the agent. Herein, coronaviruses were screened in the lung, liver, intestinal tissue samples from 15 raccoon dogs, seven Siberian weasels, three hog badger and three Reeves’s muntjacs collected in Wuhan and 334 bats collected around Wuhan. Consequently, eight alphacoronaviruses were identified in raccoon dogs, while nine betacoronaviruses were found in bats. Notably, the newly-discovered alphacoronaviruses shared a high whole genome sequence similarity (97.9%) with the canine coronavirus strain 2020/7 sampled from domestic dog in the United Kingdom. Some of betacoronaviruses identified here were closely related to previously known bat SARS-CoV-related viruses sampled from Hubei province and its neighbors, while remaining betacoronaviruses exhibited a close evolutionary relationship to SARS-CoV-related bat viruses in the RdRp gene tree and clustered together with SARS-CoV-2-related bat coronaviruses in the M, N and S gene trees, but with relatively low similarity. Additionally, these newly-discovered betacoronaviruses seem unlikely to bind angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) because of the deletions in the two key regions of their receptor binding motifs. Finally, we did not find SARS-CoV-2 or its progenitor virus in these animal samples. Due to the high circulation of canine coronaviruses in raccoon dogs in Wuhan, more scientific efforts are warranted to better understand their diversity and evolution in China and the possibility of a potential human agent.

中文翻译：

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COVID-19 出现初期在武汉及其周边地区采集的野生动物中的冠状病毒

在最近的几十年里，没有一种新出现的病毒像 2019 年底出现的 SARS-CoV-2 那样对世界产生了深远的影响。为了解 SARS-CoV-2 的起源和传播途径，我们在确定病原体后立即开始对武汉及其周边地区的野生哺乳动物进行监测调查。在这里，从武汉采集的 15 只貉、7 只西伯利亚黄鼠狼、3 只猪獾和 3 只里夫斯麂以及武汉周边采集的 334 只蝙蝠的肺、肝、肠组织样本中筛选出冠状病毒。因此，在貉中发现了 8 种 α 冠状病毒，而在蝙蝠中发现了 9 种 β 冠状病毒。值得注意的是，新发现的甲型冠状病毒具有很高的全基因组序列相似性（97. 9%) 的犬冠状病毒株 2020/7 从英国的家犬中采集。此处鉴定的一些β冠状病毒与先前已知的从湖北省及其邻近地区采集的蝙蝠SARS-CoV相关病毒密切相关，而其余β冠状病毒在RdRp基因树中与SARS-CoV相关蝙蝠病毒表现出密切的进化关系并聚集在一起在 M、N 和 S 基因树中与 SARS-CoV-2 相关的蝙蝠冠状病毒，但相似性相对较低。此外，这些新发现的 β 冠状病毒似乎不太可能结合血管紧张素转换酶 2 (ACE2)，因为它们的受体结合基序的两个关键区域缺失。最后，我们在这些动物样本中没有发现 SARS-CoV-2 或其祖病毒。