Figure 1: Image of the Al Ain central market in Abu Dhabi. Camel pens are located on the left side, cattle stalls on the right side, and sheep and goats are kept in between. The distance between camel pens and the closest pens holding sheep and goats is approximately 20 m (separated by a road). The red asterisk indicates sheep pen S18, in which the MERS-CoV-positive sheep was sampled, the green asterisk indicates the mixed pen S17, in which the borderline positive goat was kept. Image retrieved from Google Maps.
Figure 2: Next generation sequencing analysis of the MERS-CoVN gene of sheep and camels. A) Sequencing coverage of the MERS-CoV N gene derived from one sheep (S90_N) and five camels (C53_N, C5_N, C6_N, C28_N, and C50_N). The average coverage of theN gene across all samples was >6X. X axis = Ngene of MERS-CoV (1.2 kb) and Y axis = sequencing coverage; red line = sheep-derived MERS-CoV, blue lines = dromedary-derived MERS-CoV. B) Percentage of N gene sequence identity of the same samples along with three reference MERS-CoV sequences (GenBank acc. numbers KF192507, MG757604 and MK462253). The sample collected from the sheep showed high nucleotide identity (>99 %) with all camel-derived MERS-CoV sequences as well as the reference sequences. C) Multiple sequence alignment of the N gene of the same MERS-CoV samples (1.2 kb). Two short representative regions with nucleotide sequence variations are shown: positions 533 and 637 of the N gene (highlighted by a red vertical box); conserved positions are indicated by asterisks (*). Multiple sequence alignment was performed using MAFFT v7.455.