A study by a team of bioinformaticians of the University of Michigan stated that ‘Pangolins, not snakes, maybe the missing link for the transmission of the new coronavirus from bats to humans’.
The team believes that pangolins may have served as the hosts that transmitted the coronavirus to people and caused the ongoing pandemic.
During research on SARS-CoV, which caused severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) pandemic in 2003, it was found that the virus had been transmitted from bats to an intermediate host – the masked palm civet – which subsequently infected humans
Based on this, the scientists suspect that SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19), a close relative of SARS-CoV, was also transmitted from bats to an intermediate host.
There are eight species of Pangolins found in the world today, four species in Asia and four species in Africa. Among these, there are two species of Pangolin found in India, the Indian Pangolin and Chinese Pangolin. The Indian Pangolin is widely distributed in India and is also found in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. The Indian Pangolin is also broadly found West Bengal.
(Yang Zhang, Professor of Computational Medicine & Bioinformatics, University of Michigan; Chengxin Zhang, Ph.D. Candidate in Bioinformatics, University of Michigan, and Wei Zheng, Postdoctoral Fellow of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics, University of Michigan.)
(This article is based on a report from ‘The Conversation’ )