Zhengli Shi

Wuhan Institute Of Virology

Previous studies showed that the high mortality caused by viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 and influenza virus, primarily results from the complications of a cytokine storm. Therefore, it is critical to identify the key factors participating in the cytokine storm. Here, we demonstrate that the interferon-induced protein 35 (IFP35), plays an important rol...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pntd.0007733.].

Since the first reported case caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 infection in Wuhan, COVID-19 has caused serious deaths and an ongoing global pandemic, and it is still raging in more than 200 countries and regions around the world and many new variants have appeared in the process of continuous transmission. In the early stage of the epidem...

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is a novel coronavirus that is spreading rapidly, which seriously impacts global public health and economy. Thus, developing effective drugs remains urgent. We identify two potent antibodies, nCoVmab1 and nCoVmab2, targeting the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein receptor-binding domain (RBD) with...

Since the first reported case caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 infection in Wuhan, COVID-19 has caused serious deaths and an ongoing global pandemic, and it is still raging in more than 200 countries and regions around the world and many new variants have appeared in the process of continuous transmission. In the early stage of the epidem...

Severe respiratory disease coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) causes the most devastating disease, COVID-19, of the recent century. One of the unsolved scientific questions around SARS-CoV-2 is the animal origin of this virus. Bats and pangolins are recognized as the most probable reservoir hosts that harbor the highly similar SARS-CoV-2 related viruses (S...

Swine acute diarrhea syndrome coronavirus (SADS-CoV) is a recently discovered coronavirus that causes severe and acute diarrhea and rapid weight loss in piglets. SADS-CoV was reported to be capable of infecting cell lines derived from diverse species, including bats, mice, hamsters, rats, chickens, pigs, nonhuman primates, and humans, implying its...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

A new coronavirus (CoV) identified as COVID-19 virus is the etiological agent responsible for the 2019-2020 viral pneumonia outbreak that commenced in Wuhan1–4. Currently there are no targeted therapeutics and effective treatment options remain very limited. In order to rapidly discover lead compounds for clinical use, we initiated a program of com...

Bats are presumed reservoirs of diverse coronaviruses (CoVs) including progenitors of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS)-CoV and SARS-CoV-2, the causative agent of COVID-19. However, the evolution and diversification of these coronaviruses remains poorly understood. We used a Bayesian statistical framework and sequence data from all known bat...

The Chinese horseshoe bat ( Rhinolophus sinicus ), reservoir host of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV), carries many bat SARS-related CoVs (SARSr-CoVs) with high genetic diversity, particularly in the spike gene. Despite these variations, some bat SARSr-CoVs can utilize the orthologs of human SARS-CoV receptor, angiotensin-co...

A coronavirus identified as 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) is the etiological agent responsible for the 2019-2020 viral pneumonia outbreak that commenced in Wuhan. Currently there is no targeted therapeutics and effective treatment options remain very limited. In order to rapidly discover lead compounds for clinical use, we initiated a program o...

Human interaction with animals has been implicated as a primary risk factor for several high impact zoonoses, including many bat-origin viral diseases. However the animal-to-human spillover events that lead to emerging diseases are rarely observed or clinically examined, and the link between specific interactions and spillover risk is poorly unders...

Bats are reservoirs for several zoonotic pathogens, including filoviruses. Recent work highlights the diversity of bat borne filoviruses in Asia. High risk activities at the bat-human interface pose the threat of zoonotic virus transmission. We present evidence for prior exposure of bat harvesters and two resident fruit bat species to filovirus sur...

Bats are important reservoirs and vectors in the transmission of emerging infectious diseases. Many highly pathogenic viruses such as SARS-CoV and rabies-related lyssaviruses have crossed species barriers to infect humans and other animals. In this study we monitored the major roost sites of bats in Singapore, and performed surveillance for zoonoti...

Bats have been identified as a natural reservoir of a variety of coronaviruses (CoVs). Several of them have caused diseases in humans and domestic animals by interspecies transmission. Considering the diversity of bat coronaviruses, bat species and populations, we expect to discover more bat CoVs through virus surveillance. In this study, we descri...

Background: Mammarenaviruses are associated with human hemorrhagic fever diseases in Africa and America. Recently, a rodent mammarenavirus, Wēnzhōu virus (WENV) and related viruses, have been reported in China, Cambodia, and Thailand. Moreover, in Cambodia, these viruses were suspected to be associated with human disease. In China, Yunnan Province...

The giant freshwater prawn, Macrobrachium rosenbergii, is an economically important crustacean and is farmed in many countries. Since 2009, a larval mortality syndrome of M. rosenbergii has broken out and spread widely in the main breeding area, including Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Guangxi, and Guangdong Provinces in mainland China. A novel virus, named Ma...

Wereport the isolation and characterization of a novel bat coronavirus which is much closer to the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) in genomic sequence than others previously reported, particularly in its S gene. Cell entry and susceptibility studies indicated that this virus can use ACE2 as a receptor and infect animal and...

Bats have been recognized as the natural reservoirs of a large variety of viruses. Special attention has been paid to bat coronaviruses as the two emerging coronaviruses which have caused unexpected human disease outbreaks in the 21st century, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus...

In the spring of 2013, a newly pathogenic H7N9 influenza virus emerged in people in China, likely associated with wild and domestic birds (Kageyama et al. 2013). Marking the exact scenario that public health experts had feared—people were being infected, getting sick, and dying without the source of the virus being rapidly and definitively identifi...

Bats are natural reservoir hosts for many viruses that produce no clinical symptoms in bats. Therefore, bats may have evolved effective mechanisms to control viral replication. However, little information is available on bat immune responses to viral infection. Type I interferon (IFN) plays a key role in controlling viral infections. In this study,...

The emergence of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS)-CoV underscores the threat of cross-species transmission events leading to outbreaks in humans. Here we examine the disease potential of a SARS-like virus, SHC014-CoV, which is currently circulating in Chinese horseshoe bat populati...

Bats have been identified as natural reservoirs of many viruses, including reoviruses. Recent studies have demonstrated the interspecies transmission of bat reoviruses to humans. In this study, we report the isolation and molecular characterization of six strains of mammalian orthoreovirus (MRV) from Hipposideros and Myotis. These isolates were gro...

Phytoplankton viruses are important components of aquatic ecosystems. However, their prevalence and genetic diversity in marine and freshwater systems are largely under estimated owing to the immense size of water bodies and limitations in virus discovery techniques. In this study, we conducted a 1-year survey of phytoplankton virus communities by...

Two novel human infectious coronaviruses, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV), have caused pandemics in the 21st century, and it is believed that both viruses originated from bats. During the last 10 years, studies involving surveillance, genomics, classification, rece...

To understand how MERS coronavirus (MERS-CoV) transmitted from bats to humans, we compared the virus-surface spikes of MERS-CoV and a related bat coronavirus HKU4. Although HKU4 spike cannot mediate viral entry into human cells, two mutations enabled it to do so by allowing it to be activated by human proteases. These mutations are present in MERS-...

Unlabelled: The 5' cap structures of eukaryotic mRNAs are important for RNA stability and protein translation. Many viruses that replicate in the cytoplasm of eukaryotes have evolved 2'-O-methyltransferases (2'-O-MTase) to autonomously modify their mRNAs and carry a cap-1 structure (m7GpppNm) at the 5' end, thereby facilitating viral replication a...

As the only flying mammal, bats harbor a number of emerging and re-emerging viruses, many of which cause severe diseases in humans and other mammals yet result in no clinical symptoms in bats. As the master regulator of the interferon (IFN)-dependent immune response, IFN regulatory factor 7 (IRF7) plays a central role in innate antiviral immunity....

Astroviruses infect human and many animal species and cause gastroenteritis. To extensively understand the distribution and genetic diversity of astrovirus in small mammals, we tested 968 anal swabs from 39 animal species, most of which were bats and rodents. We detected diverse astroviruses in 10 bat species, including known bat astroviruses and a...

Bats are recognized reservoirs for many emerging zoonotic viruses of public health importance. Identifying and cataloguing the viruses of bats is a logical approach to evaluate the range of potential zoonoses of bat origin. We characterized the fecal pathogen microbiome of both insectivorous and frugivorous bats, incorporating 281 individual bats c...

Dear Editor,The packaging of viral genomic RNA into virus par-ticles is a critical step for virus maturation.This stepincludes the recognition and interaction between the nu-cleocapsid protein and viral RNA.The necessity of viralRNA packaging signals has been described for manyRNA viruses(Cologna R,et al.,2000;Narayanan K,et al.,2001;Tchatalbachev...

The 2002-3 pandemic caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) was one of the most significant public health events in recent history. An ongoing outbreak of Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus suggests that this group of viruses remains a key threat and that their distribution is wider than previously recognized. A...

East Lake (Lake Donghu), located in Wuhan, China, is a typical city freshwater lake that has been experiencing eutrophic conditions and algal blooming during recent years. Marine and fresh water are considered to contain a large number of viruses. However, little is known about their genetic diversity because of the limited techniques for culturing...

Bats play important roles as pollen disseminators and pest predators. However, recent interest has focused on their role as natural reservoirs of pathogens associated with emerging infectious diseases. Prior to the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), about 60 bat virus species had been reported. The number of identified bat viruse...

Bat SARS-like coronavirus (SL-CoV) has a genome organization almost identical to that of SARS-CoV, but the N-terminus of the Spike (S) proteins, which interacts with host receptor and is a major target of neutralizing antibodies against CoVs, of the two viruses has only 63-64% sequence identity. Although there have been reports studying the overall...

Bats are the only mammals capable of sustained flight and are notorious reservoir hosts for some of the world's most highly pathogenic viruses, including Nipah, Hendra, Ebola, and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). To identify genetic changes associated with the development of bat-specific traits, we performed whole-genome sequencing and com...

Bat adenoviruses are a group of recently identified adenoviruses (AdVs) which are highly prevalent in bats yet share low similarity to known AdVs from other species. In this study, deep RNA sequencing was used to analyze the transcriptome at five time points following the infection of a bat AdV in a kidney cell line derived from a myotis bat specie...

Background The genus Ebolavirus of the family Filoviridae currently consists of five species. All species, with the exception of Reston ebolavirus, have been found in Africa and caused severe human diseases. Bats have been implicated as reservoirs for ebolavirus. Reston ebolavirus, discovered in the Philippines, is the only ebolavirus species ident...

Ebola virus (EBOV) and Marburg virus (MARV) are causative agents of severe hemorrhagic fever with high mortality rates in humans and non-human primates and there is currently no licensed vaccine or therapeutics. To date, there is no specific laboratory diagnostic test in China, while there is a national need to provide differential diagnosis during...

Previous metagenomic analysis indicated that numerous insect viruses exist in bat guano. In this study, we isolated a novel double-stranded RNA virus, a tentative member of the family Totiviridae, designated Tianjin totivirus (ToV-TJ), from bat feces. The virus is an icosahedral particle with a diameter of 40-43 nm, and it causes cytopathic effect...

Increasing data indicate that bats harbor diverse viruses, some of which cause severe human diseases. In this study, sequence-independent amplification and high-throughput sequencing (Solexa) were applied to the metagenomic analysis of viruses in bat fecal samples collected from 6 locations in China. A total of 8,746,417 reads with a length of 306,...

The ORF3b protein of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) has a nuclear localization signal (NLS) at its C terminus and antagonizes interferon (IFN) function by modulating the activity of IFN regulatory factor 3 (IRF3). SARS-like coronaviruses (SL-CoVs) found in bats share an identical genome organization and high sequence ident...

This chapter discusses the evolution of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) coronavirus and the relevance of modern molecular epidemiology. The first case was reported in China in November 2002 and led to a disastrous worldwide pandemic. An international SARS network was established by WHO to rapidly identify the causative agent. In March 2003...

Heme oxygenase (HO-1) is a cytoprotective enzyme that plays a critical role in defending the body against oxidant-induced injury during inflammatory processes. In mammalian systems, viral infection or antigen expression can down-regulate the expression of HO-1. In turn, the induction of HO-1 or overexpression of HO-1 results in potent and direct an...

Primers used in this study. (XLS)

Bats are rich reservoir hosts for a variety of viruses, many of which are capable of spillover to other susceptible mammals with lethal consequences. The ability of bats to remain asymptomatic to viral infection may be due to the rapid control of viral replication very early in the immune response through innate antiviral mechanisms. Type I and III...

The core nucleocapsid protein VP15 of White spot syndrome virus (WSSV) was shown to interact with DNA and predicted to be involved in the packaging of the WSSV genome. In the present study, we explored the colocalization of VP15 with several nuclear proteins in insect cells. The results showed that the VP15 completely colocalized with nucleolin and...

Novel circular ssDNA genomes have recently been detected in animals and in the environment using metagenomic and high-throughput sequencing approaches. In this study, five full-length circular ssDNA genomes were recovered from bat faecal samples using inverse PCR with sequences designed based on circovirus-related sequences obtained from Solexa seq...

Nodaviridae is a family of non-enveloped isometric viruses with bipartite positive-sense RNA genomes. The Nodaviridae family consists of two genera: alpha- and beta-nodavirus. Alphanodaviruses usually infect insect cells. Some commercially available insect cell lines have been latently infected by Alphanodaviruses. A non-enveloped small virus of ap...

Nipah virus (NiV) and Hendra virus (HeV) are zoonotic paramyxoviruses classified in the genus Henipavirus of the family Paramyxoviridae. The entry of henipaviruses occurs through a pH-independent membrane-fusion mechanism mediated by the cooperation of the viral attachment (G) and fusion (F) envelope glycoproteins following virion binding to suscep...

Recent studies showed that white spot syndrome virus (WSSV) isolates from different geographic locations share a high genetic similarity except the variable regions in ORF23/24 and ORF14/15, and variable number of tandem repeats (VNTR) within ORF94. In this study, genotyping was performed according to these three variable regions among WSSV isolate...

Bats are known to harbor a number of emerging and re-emerging zoonotic viruses, many of which are highly pathogenic in other mammals but result in no clinical symptoms in bats. The ability of bats to coexist with viruses may be the result of rapid control of viral replication early in the immune response. IFNs provide the first line of defense agai...

Rodents are the major natural reservoir of hantaviruses, which cause two main human zoonoses, haemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome (HFRS) in Eurasia and hantavirus pulmonary syndrome (HPS) in the Americas. Surveillance of hantaviruses in rodents plays an important role in the prevention and control of HFRS and HPS. In this study, small mammals we...