In vivo delivery of Cas9 ribonucleoprotein and donor DNA with gold
nanoparticles
The Year of Rat is unfortunately dominated by bats due to the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak. Although
we are not 100% certain that this is a bat virus, all the evidence suggests that there is a high chance that it
originated from bats. This is a “SARS-like event caused by a SARS-like virus” based on the following: 1) the onset
of the outbreak is in the Chinese winter (November – December); 2) the major transmission event(s) have a strong
epidemiological link to wildlife market; 3) the virus belongs to the same species, SARS relative coronavirus
(SARSr-CoV), as SARS-CoV; 4) a bat CoV genome detected in a horseshoe bat (RaTG13) is 96% identical in sequence to
2019-nCoV.
In exactly 25 years, we have had multiple zoonotic diseases outbreaks caused by bat-borne viruses
or probable bat viruses: Hendra in Australia (first detected in 1994), Nipah in Malaysia/Singapore (1998/9), SARS
outbreak (2002/3), MERS outbreak (2012), large scale Ebola virus outbreak (2014) and the Covid-19 (2019/20).
Work from Prof Wang’s group and others have discovered that the bat’s innate defense and tolerance
responses are better balanced in comparison to other mammals. On one hand, they have high basal level defense
systems (such as DNA damage repair, heat shock, membrane efflux pumps switched on before encountering danger
signals. On the other hand, they have evolved sophisticated mechanisms to prevent over reaction (such as over
inflammation) upon viral infection and other cell stress signals.
It is now well recognized that bats are a special group of mammals exceptionally fit as
natural reservoir of many different viruses. If we don’t change the way we live, farm and eat, it is almost
certain that such outbreak will happen again in the not to distant future.
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Prof Wang Linfa
