Researchers find evidence that coronavirus not leaked

Beijing: A team of Chinese scientists has found strong evidence that the novel coronavirus is of natural origin and not leaked from a laboratory.

The researchers made the discovery by analyzing a close relative strain of the virus, denoted RmYN02, which is derived from bats and shares a high degree of identity with the novel coronavirus in the 1ab region of the genome.

Researchers found that the strain, in a similar manner to the novel coronavirus, was characterized by the insertion of multiple amino acids at the junction site of the S1 and S2 subunits of the spike protein. This provides strong evidence that such insertion events can occur naturally during the evolution of coronaviruses.