Virus spillovers are potentially serious, for two reasons
. As they expected, based on news that broke while they were conducting their work, the bond with minkfrom white-tailed deer, long before reports of infections in that species emerged. Cats and dogs also showed up as being at risk—which reports then confirmed that they were. And gorillas and macaques, which have suffered a few cases in zoos, looked susceptible as well.
Useful as this information was, Dr Han was keen to look beyond these 142 species. To delve deeper, the team built a database of evolutionary traits shared by the species with the most vulnerablereceptors. This is a technique which has been used successfully in the past on rodents and bats, to assess their likelihood of acting as reservoirs for viruses including Ebola and Zika.
The researchers studied everything they could—from breadth of diet, metabolic rate and age of sexual maturity to litter size, lifespan, geographical range and phylogenetic relationships—about more than 5,000 mammals for which little or no-receptor information was available. This enormous database completed, they fed the outcome into a machine-learning system that had been trained on the characteristics of the 142 species they had already examined.
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