In an article published in Nature Medicine1 on 9 November, scientists investigated a virus called SHC014, which is found in horseshoe bats in China. The researchers created a chimaeric virus, made up of a surface protein of SHC014 and the backbone of a SARS virus that had been adapted to grow in mice and to mimic human disease. The chimaera infected human airway cells — proving that the surface protein of SHC014 has the necessary structure to bind to a key receptor on the cells and to infect them. It also caused disease in mice, but did not kill them.
Although almost all coronaviruses isolated from bats have not been able to bind to the key human receptor, SHC014 is not the first that can do so. In 2013, researchers reported this ability for the first time in a different coronavirus isolated from the same bat population.2
Comment: Nature has since added the following note to this article: In re-posting this, we are not suggesting that this particular research was directly involved in engineering SARS-CoV-2 - if indeed it was engineered or 'tweaked' at all.
But it's nevertheless instructive that such research is conducted. Obviously, being public research, it is not implicated in any nefarious bio-weapons or 'bio-hacking' experiments. But its findings could readily be used by firewalled, private networks in which research takes place away from any public scrutiny.