In an October 30, 2013 paper in Nature, Shi Zheng-Li and Peter Daszak et al reported a key discovery: that certain bat viruses could potentially infect humans without first jumping to an intermediate animal.
By isolating a live SARS-like bat coronavirus (from a rufous horseshoe bat in Yunnan mine 2012) for the first time, bat SL-CoV-WIV1, Shi’s team found that it could enter human cells through a protein called the ACE2 receptor. [1]