Pekar, J.E., Lytras, S., Ghafari, M., Magee, A.F., Parker, E., Wang, Y., …, Lemey, P. (2025). The recency and geographical origins of the bat viruses ancestral to SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2. Cell, online.
Summary: The emergence of SARS-CoV in 2002 and SARS-CoV-2 in 2019 led to increased sampling of sarbecoviruses circulating in horseshoe bats. Employing phylogenetic inference while accounting for recombination of bat sarbecoviruses, we find that the closest-inferred bat virus ancestors of SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 existed less than a decade prior to their emergence in humans.