Now The Mail on Sunday has learned that scientists there experimented on bats as part of a project funded by the US National Institutes of Health, which continues to licence the Wuhan laboratory to receive American money for experiments.Results of the research were published in November 2017 under the heading: 'Discovery of a rich gene pool of bat SARS-related coronaviruses provides new insights into the origin of SARS coronavirus.'The exercise was summarised as: 'Bats in a cave in Yunnan, China were captured and sampled for coronaviruses used for lab experiments......'Bat samplings were conducted ten times from April 2011 to October 2015 at different seasons in their natural habitat at a single location (cave) in Kunming, Yunnan Province, China. Bats were trapped and faecal swab samples were collected.'Another study, published in April 2018, was titled 'fatal swine acute diarrhoea syndrome caused by an HKU2-related coronavirus of bat origin' and described the research as such: 'Following a 2016 bat-related coronavirus outbreak on Chinese pig farms, bats were captured in a cave and samples were taken.Senior Ministers say that while the latest intelligence does not dispute the virus was 'zoonotic' – originating in animals – it no longer rules out that the virus first spread to humans after leaking from a Wuhan laboratory.Last week, further doubt was cast on the animal market theory after Cao Bin, a doctor at the Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital, highlighted research showing that 13 of the first 41 patients diagnosed with the infection had not had any contact with the market. 'It seems clear that the seafood market is not the only origin of the virus,' he said.The £30 million Wuhan Institute of Virology, the most advanced laboratory of its type on the Chinese mainland, is based ten miles from the now infamous wildlife market.