| Summary: | <p>Zoonotic diseases and viral infections impose substantial health and economic challenges globally. Timely prediction, detection, and response to these threats are paramount for zoonoses prevention. Recent strides in next-generation sequencing and computational capabilities have elevated pathogen genomics to its application as a leading method for predication, and both real-time and retrospective tracking of zoonotic infections.</p>
<p>Globally, there are a limited number of facilities which can routinely process and characterise hazard group 4 agents which cause high consequence viral infections. Many HG4 agents are underrepresented by genomic sequences in the public domain which prevents accurate prediction of risk regions and dissemination. Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever virus is a globally distributed virus with limited genomic representation compared to other forms of evidence, serological or molecular. This project characterised novel genomes from archival and contemporary clinical samples stored at Porton Down. We characterise the heterogeneous viral population circulating in Turkey in 2015 and corroborate current predictions for the global dissemination and divergence of CCHFv with its origin in Southern Africa.</p>
<p>The COVID-19 pandemic provided a unique opportunity for the characterisation of sarbecoviruses from horseshoe bats in the UK. Prior to 2020, surveillance in horseshoe bats had been focused on populations in China and Hong Kong leaving a largely undefined western limit for sarbecoviruses within horseshoe bat populations. Here we detect and characterise the first Sarbecovirus from lesser horseshoe bats in Europe and the first in horseshoe bats in the UK. Additionally, continued longitudinal surveillance highlighted an accelerated evolutionary rate within the receptor binding motif, potentially highlighting it as a zoonotic risk.</p>
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