Which Animals Most Vulnerable to COVID Infection?

TUESDAY, Dec. 15, 2020 (HealthDay News) — Humans, ferrets, cats, civets and canines are the animals most vulnerable to an infection with the brand new coronavirus, researchers say.

The evaluation of 10 species additionally discovered that geese, rats, mice, pigs and chickens had been much less or not vulnerable to SARS-CoV-2 an infection.

“Knowing which animals are susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 helps us prevent building up animal reservoirs from which the coronavirus can re-emerge at a later date,” stated the research’s senior writer, Luis Serrano.

“Our findings offer a clue for why minks — which are closely related to the ferret — are being infected by the disease, which is probably made worse by their packed living conditions and close contact with human workers,” he added. Serrano is director of the Center for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona, Spain.

“Though we also find a potential susceptibility to infection by cats, they don’t co-exist with humans in the same conditions as other animals, which may explain why so far there are no known cases of people being infected by their pets,” Serrano stated in a middle information launch.

The research was printed on-line lately within the journal PLOS Computational Biology.

For their research, the researchers used pc modeling to evaluate how the brand new coronavirus makes use of spike proteins on its floor to invade the cells of various animals.

The fundamental entry level on a cell’s floor is the ACE2 receptor, which binds with the spike protein. People have a variety of ACE2 variants, as do totally different species.

Variants of the ACE2 receptor in people, adopted by ferrets, cats, canines and civets, have the strongest binding to the spike protein on the brand new coronavirus. Mice, rats, hen and geese have poor binding, in keeping with the researchers.

The investigators additionally discovered that totally different human variants of ACE2 could have an effect on whether or not individuals are extra prone to have extreme COVID-19 signs.

“We have identified mutations on the S-protein that dramatically reduces the capacity of SARS-CoV-2 to enter into the cell, protecting the host from catching COVID-19,” stated research first writer Javier Delgado, who can be a researcher on the middle.

“We are now engineering mini-proteins from the human ACE2 protein to ‘distract’ the attention of the virus from entering cells and block an infection,” he stated. “Should new mutations of the viral spike protein arise, we could engineer new variants to block them.”

Learning extra about totally different species’ susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2 an infection may help information public well being measures, comparable to decreasing human contact with different vulnerable animals, in keeping with the researchers.

More info

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has extra on COVID-19.

SOURCE: Center for Genomic Regulation, information launch, Dec. 10, 2020