THE search for the source of the SARS virus may finally have ended. Evidence from China and Australia now strongly suggests that it came from horseshoe bats, an insect-eating genus that can be found from Europe to Australasia.
Lin-Fa Wang at the Australian Animal Health Laboratory, in Geelong, Victoria, and colleagues found the virus lurking in more than a third of horseshoe bats in four species from south China. They found that it is genetically “extremely close” to the SARS virus and has proteins which are 96 to 100 per cent identical to it (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science. 1118391). The…
