New coronaviruses close relatives of SarsCoV2 have been discovered in the frozen tissues of some types of bats, stored in the laboratory in Cambodia and Japan.
It is the first time that viruses related to the pandemic coronavirus have been found outside China, as reported by the website of the journal Nature.
In Cambodia, the virus was found in two Shamel's horseshoe bats captured in the north of the country in 2010.
However, its genome has not yet been fully sequenced nor the published discovery, making it difficult to verify its full significance.
"If it was really connected or an ancestor of the pandemic coronavirus, it would be crucial information to understand how SarsCov2 went from bats to humans," comments Veasna Duong, virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Phnom Penh, who coordinated the study and reported the discovery to Nature.
To provide useful information, the virus would have to share more than 97% of its genome with that of SarsCoV2.
If the new virus were instead a 'more distant relative', "it could still help to better understand the diversity of this family of viruses," adds Etienne Simon-Loriere, virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris.
This appears to be the case with the other virus identified in Japan in a small horseshoe bat captured in 2013.
The virus, called Rc-0319, in fact shares 81% of its genome with SARSCoV2, according to the study published in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, therefore too distant to give clues to the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Regardless of what the Cambodian group finds, "both findings are interesting because they confirm that viruses closely related to SarsCov2 are quite common in this type of bats, even outside of China," adds Alice Latinne, of the Wildlife Conservation Society Vietnam in Hanoi, and that there may be other relatives of SarsCov2 not yet discovered preserved in other laboratories.
