New research finds that SARS-CoV-2, the new coronavirus that causes COVID-19, is the result of the natural process of evolution rather than a product of laboratory engineering. Ana Sandoiu writes in Medical News Today says thatin the new study, which appears in the journal Nature Medicine, Kristian Andersen, Ph.D., an associate professor of immunology and microbiology at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, CA, and colleagues set out to see what they could deduce about the origin of the new coronavirus from analyzing the genomic data available. As the authors mention in their paper, since the start of the COVID-19 outbreak, researchers have been trying to grapple with the origins of the virus that caused it. The scientists found that the receptor-binding domain of the spike protein had evolved to target ACE2 so effectively that it could only have been the result of natural selection and not of genetic engineering.Furthermore, the molecular structure of the backbone of SARS-CoV-2 supported this finding. If scientists had engineered the new coronavirus purposely as a pathogen, explain the researchers, the starting point would likely have been the backbone of another virus in the coronavirus family.