1 INTRODUCTION

Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)‐CoV‐2 emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019, and causes a respiratory illness called COVID‐19, which can spread from person to person. As of 2 March 2020, there have been 89 868 cases and 3069 deaths, and the virus has spread to six continents. There are no specific antivirals or vaccines for this disease.

SARS‐CoV‐2 is a member of the Coronaviridae family and includes a number of viruses that cause the common cold (eg, 229E, OC43, NL63, and HKU1).1 SARS‐CoV‐2 is also related to SARS‐CoV and Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS‐CoV), which cause severe disease that is associated with high mortality rates.2, 3 Coronaviruses originate in bats but are zoonotic and can circulate in a number of mammals and birds.1 SARS‐CoV emerged into the human population because of the exotic food trade in China, which allowed for a transmission event between a civet cat and a human.4 MERS‐CoV has emerged into the human population because of the use of camels as livestock, which has allowed for multiple transmission events between camels and humans.5

The intermediate animal host of SARS‐CoV‐2 is still unknown.2, 3 In this study, I mined the NCBI expressed sequence tag (est) database to discover sequences related to SARS‐CoV‐2. SARS‐like virus sequences that were highly homologous to SARS‐CoV‐2 were identified in two separate complementary DNA (cDNA) pools. The first pool was from a Carassius auratus (crusian carp) cell line and the second was from Ctenopharyngodon idella (grass carp) head kidney tissue.6, 7 The sequence from C. auratus cDNA was 152 amino acids long and the sequence from C. idealla cDNA was 88 amino acids long. BLAST analysis suggests that these sequences belong to SARS‐like coronaviruses, and that they are not evolutionarily conserved in other species.

Investigation of the submitting laboratories revealed that two laboratories from the Institute of Hydrobiology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Wuhan, China performed the research. This institution is less than 10 miles from the Wuhan South China Seafood Wholesale Market where SARS‐CoV‐2 first amplified in the human population. It is important to highlight the limitation of this study, which relies solely on a bioinformatics pipeline, which may be flawed. However, these data raise the possibility that SARS‐like coronaviruses are a common environmental pathogen in the region. Further research is required to test cell lines and the aquatic environment in and around the epicenter of the epidemic for SARS‐like coronaviruses.