An international research team has harnessed the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to aid in the search for the next coronavirus host.
The study was led by researchers at the Univ. of Oklahoma and Georgetown Univ., and included collaborators from many other universities and research institutes. The authors are part of the Viral Emergence Research Initiative (VERENA) consortium, which curates a massive ecosystem of open data in viral ecology, and creates tools to help predict which viruses could infect humans and which animals could host those viruses.
SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, is part of a genera of coronaviruses known as betacoronaviruses. Bats are one of the primary “natural reservoirs” of betacoronaviruses; a natural reservoir is the population of organisms in which these infectious pathogens naturally live and reproduce. To find the animal host that may be responsible for the next coronavirus outbreak, researchers combined knowledge of bat ecology and betacoronaviruses in a series of machine-learning models to identify bat species that could host these viruses.
“One of the most important things our study gives us is a data-driven shortlist of which bat species should be studied further,” says Daniel Becker, assistant professor of biology at the Univ. of Oklahoma. “After identifying...
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