Infection of animal coronaviruses into a bat cell line from the kidney of Pipistrellus abramus.

Abstract

Although most coronaviruses are thought to have their origins in bats, there is little information on whether bats are still susceptible to the currently prevalent coronaviruses. We generated a continuous cell line from a kidney of Pipistrellus abramus (P. abramus) by serial passaging of the cells, which could be proliferated for more than 80 passages without any immortalization process. We found that porcine epidemic diarrhea virus (PEDV) and bovine coronavirus (BCoV) were able to infect and generate progeny viruses in P. abramus-derived cells in the presence of trypsin, although the replication efficiency was quite low. The findings suggest that P. abramus could be susceptible to PEDV and BCoV and may play a potential role as a transmitter of the viruses.