Covid: "We started to think, 'Why bats?'"

Why Bats Make Such Good Viral Hosts
By Katarina Zimmer
May 31. 2020
The Scientist

The bat version of the STING protein helps dampen the mammals' immune response to infection, researchers have found. ... Despite STING’s role in viral responses, Zhou believes that the mutation may be conserved in bats for a different reason, one related to another aspect of bats’ livelihood. Fragments of the bats’ own DNA can also be released into their cells’ cytoplasm as a byproduct of the strenuous effort bats make during flight, Zhou says. This has led him to the [working] hypothesis that the mutation originally provided an evolutionary advantage to bats by preventing their immune systems from boiling over every time the animals fly.

Bats carry and transmit some of the world’s deadliest zoonotic viruses: Ebola, Marburg, Nipah, and the pathogen behind severe acute respiratory syndrome, SARS coronavirus, to name a few. What has puzzled researchers for a long time is why bats don’t appear to get sick from their unusually high microbial loads. 

The question has been nagging Peng Zhou, a virologist at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, for more than a decade, ever since he took part in a survey of bat populations in southern China. Zhou and his colleagues were looking for the strain of the SARS coronavirus responsible for the 2003 outbreak that sickened more than 8,000 people worldwide and killed nearly 800. 

“We started to think, why bats?” he says.

[...]

And with that, Zhou and his colleagues were off and running. Fascinating story, great science. 

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