Recently in December 2019, China reported cases with pneumonia of unknown aetiology in the Hubei province, Wuhan city4. Further analysis of these cases was carried out to identify the causative agent of pneumonia5. Virus isolation and genomic characterization of the complete sequence of the virus through next-generation sequencing (NGS), identified it as a novel CoV, named 2019-nCoV3. The virus characterization revealed that it is an enveloped RNA virus with a genome size of 29,903 bp. The phylogenetic analysis of the sequence showed that it belonged to the Sarbecovirus subgenus of genus Betacoronavirus and the family Coronaviridae. The sequence was closely related (~87.5% sequence similarity) to two bat-derived SARS-like CoV strains (bat-SL-CoVZC45 and bat-SL-CoVZXC21) that are known to infect humans, including the virus which led to the 2003 SARS-CoV-1 outbreak6. The 2019-nCoV is now named as SARS-CoV-27. Further, based on SimPlot analyses, it was demonstrated that SARS-CoV-2 was more closely related to the BatCoV RaTG13 sequence (~96.3% similarity) throughout the genome. The bat-SL-CoVZC45 and bat-SL-CoVZXC21 strains clustered differently from the group formed by SARS-CoV-2 and BatCoV RaTG13 in the region spanning the 3′-end of open reading frame (ORF)1a, the ORF1b and almost half of the spike region8.