Medical Xpress January 10, 2022
An international research team led by scientists at Georgetown University have demonstrated the power of artificial intelligence to predict which viruses could infect humans—like SARS-CoV-2, the virus that led to the COVID-19 pandemic—which animals host them, and where they could emerge.
Their ensemble of predictive models of likely reservoir hosts, published January 10 in Lancet Microbe (“Optimizing predictive models to prioritize viral discovery in zoonotic reservoirs”), was validated in an 18-month project to identify specific bat species likely to carry betacoronaviruses, the group that includes SARS-like viruses.
“If you want to find these viruses, you have to start by profiling their hosts—their ecology, their evolution, even the shape of their wings,” explains the study’s senior author, Colin Carlson, Ph.D., an...
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