Recently, Dr. Zhao Jincun’s and Dr. Zhou Rong’s teams of SKLRD jointly discovered a subgenotype of porcine respiratory coronavirus NL63 in respiratory samples from hospitalized children, which shows stronger cell invasion ability. The paper “Discovery of a subgenotype of human coronavirus NL63 associated with severe lower respiratory tract infection in China 2018” was published online in Emerging Microbes & Infections (EMI), a world renowned journal.

There are seven main types of human respiratory coronaviruses, four of which are conventional coronaviruses, including coronaviruses NL63, 229E, HKU1 and OC43. They mainly cause symptoms such as fever and cough, which are pandemic throughout the world, and can also cause severe illness in the elderly, children and people with immunodeficiency. There are also three highly pathogenic coronaviruses, i.e. severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV), Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) and new coronavirus (2019-nCoV), which can cause severe pneumonia and even death.

Figure 1. Time-dependent evolution of the HCoV-NL63 subgenotype

Figure 2. Analysis of amino acid diversity of HCoV-NL63 subgenotype