In the fall of 2021, as Denver was grinding through yet another phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, the SARS-CoV-2 virus quietly crossed a boundary that most people never considered: It jumped from humans and moved into big cat enclosures at the Denver Zoo.
That episode, involving Amur tigers, African lions and spotted hyenas, is the subject of a newly released study in the journal Nature Communications, led by Colorado researchers who analyzed how SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, behaved after infecting animals housed in a controlled zoo environment. Drawing on months of diagnostic testing and viral genome sequencing, the research offers a detailed look at what happens when the virus crosses into non-human hosts.
The study’s authors include scientists from Colorado State University, the CSU Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratories and the Denver Zoo Conservation Alliance. One of those authors is Sue VandeWoude, a CSU veterinarian and virologist who has spent years studying how viruses move across species.
From Humans to Cats
“What this analysis allowed us to do, because of the unique samples we had, was to evaluate the changes that are occurring in the virus genome as it moves from species to species,” VandeWoude tells Westword. “It shows that when the virus does that, it has to change a little bit to be optimized to grow within a different host.”…