New research finds that SARS-CoV-2, the new coronavirus that causes COVID-19, is the result of the natural process of evolution rather than a product of laboratory engineering.
The new study appears in the journal Nature Medicine, and Kristian Andersen, Ph.D., an associate professor of immunology and microbiology at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, CA, is the first and corresponding author on the paper.
Andersen and colleagues set out to see what they could deduce about the origin of the new coronavirus from analyzing the genomic data available.
As the authors mention in their paper, since the start of the COVID-19 outbreak, researchers have been trying to grapple with the origins of the virus that caused it.