Before public release of virus sequences from cases of 2019-nCoV, we relied on social media reports announcing detection of a SARS-like virus. We thus assumed that a SARS-related CoV is involved in the outbreak. We downloaded all complete and partial (if > 400 nt) SARS-related virus sequences available in GenBank by 1 January 2020. The list (n = 729 entries) was manually checked and artificial sequences (laboratory-derived, synthetic, etc), as well as sequence duplicates were removed, resulting in a final list of 375 sequences. These sequences were aligned and the alignment was used for assay design (Supplementary Figure S1). Upon release of the first 2019-nCoV sequence at virological.org, three assays were selected based on how well they matched to the 2019-nCoV genome (Figure 1). The alignment was complemented by additional sequences released independently on GISAID (https://www.gisaid.org), confirming the good matching of selected primers to all sequences. Alignments of primer binding domains with 2019-nCoV, SARS-CoV as well as selected bat-associated SARS-related CoV are shown in Figure 2.