An international research team, led by Professor Yi Guan and Dr Huachen Zhu of the State Key Laboratory of Emerging Infectious Diseases and School of Public Health, Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, The University of Hong Kong (HKU), in collaboration with King Abdulaziz University, Saudi Arabia; and scientists from Mainland China, Australia and Egypt revealed that the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) coronavirus has become enzootic in dromedary camels in Saudi Arabia and diverged into five distinct lineages. Viruses that led to the Korean outbreak and the recent human infections in the Middle East were from lineage 5 and generated by recombination between viruses of lineages 3 and 4.
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