According to a February 11 report from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the coronavirus known as 2019-nCoV has infected more than 42,000 people and killed 1,016 in China since December. In a study published last week (February 7) in Cell Host & Microbe, researchers annotated three 2019-nCoV genomes and identified both differences and similarities compared with other genomes, including that of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) coronavirus.

“It’s very helpful to know what the genome looks like and what the proteins look like,” says Rachel Roper, a biologist at East Carolina University who was part of the team that first analyzed and sequenced the SARS coronavirus genome in 2003 and did not participate in this study. “It gives us some idea about what protein differences may be that are allowing this virus to be so virulent and transmissible in humans.”

We’re all wondering where this virus came from, and we can see from the new sequence and the sequences that we’ve already had for coronaviruses that it’s likely to be a recombinant of a number of different coronaviruses that are known.

—Rachel Roper, East Carolina University

As of January 20, there were 14 genome sequences for 2019-nCoV that had been released by six different labs. Each is available to researchers through either the National Center for Biotechnology Information’s Genbank or the Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data (GISAID). While some research teams have done preliminary phylogenetic analysis and annotation, this report is one of the first in-depth looks at these genomes.