FIGURE 1.

Phylogenetic tree of different representative CoVs based on the Spike (S) protein gene (the strain responsible for the pandemic SARS‐CoV‐2 in humans is shown with the bolded character among the Betacoronavirus genus). The shown animals are hosts from where the corresponding CoVs were isolated. The sequences of all animal CoVs were downloaded from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) GenBank database (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genbank/). The tree was constructed using the Neighbour‐Joining method (bootstrap resampling = 1,000 replicates and bootstrap values are indicated as % at branch points) (Saitou & Nei, 1987). The evolutionary distances were computed using the Maximum Composite Likelihood method (Tamura et al., 2004) and are in the units of the number of base substitutions per site. All positions containing either gaps or missing data were eliminated. There were a total of 2044 positions in the final dataset. Evolutionary analyses were made with MEGA7 (Kumar et al., 2016)