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Modes of Transmission of Coronavirus
Published in Ram Shringar Raw, Vishal Jain, Sanjoy Das, Meenakshi Sharma, Pandemic Detection and Analysis Through Smart Computing Technologies, 2022
Mohd. Faiz Saifi, Colin E. Evans, Neha Gupta
Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) is a dreadful disease caused by the CoVs, namely SARS-CoV and is characterized by some specific symptoms such as headache, extreme fever, and many severe symptoms of the respiratory tract such as short breath, pneumonia, and dry cough [61]. The pathogenic CoVs can infect humans and livestock such as mice, bats, and birds at various sites such as the gastrointestinal, respiratory, hepatic, and central nervous systems. Previously SARS-CoV belongs to the group of 2b (gene) CoV and now it is a member of lineage B of genus ß coronavirus belonging to the family of Coronaviridae and subfamily Coronavirinae [61]. The genome of SARS-CoV shares similarity to other coronaviruses, but have some specific unique genes including 3b, ORF3a, ORF7a, ORFa, 7b, ORF 8a, 8b, and 9b. Importantly, SARS-CoV interacts with the ACE-2 receptor of the host cell to infect bronchial epithelial cells and type II pneumocytes in the host. A recent spillover or outbreak of CoV strain (COVID-19) in China, in 2019, has gained attention all over the world, as continuous evolution and transformation led to the emergence of pandemic all over the world [62].
Nanoprotection from SARS-COV-2: would nanotechnology help in Personal Protection Equipment (PPE) to control the transmission of COVID-19?
Published in International Journal of Environmental Health Research, 2023
Zhi Xin Phuna, Bibhu Prasad Panda, Naveen Kumar Hawala Shivashekaregowda, Priya Madhavan
CoVs are classified under the family Coronaviridae, which is a monophyletic cluster in the order of Nidovirales. The subfamily Orthocoronavirinae contains another 4 genera, alphacoronavirus, betacoronavirus, gammacoronavirus and deltacoronavirus. The CoV is an enveloped virus with a positive sense and single-stranded RNA (Hasöksüz et al. 2020). SARS-CoV-2 is a betacoronavirus, encoding a large and non-structural polyprotein (ORF1a/b) that is proteolytically cleaved to produce 15/16 proteins, 5 accessory proteins (ORF3a, ORF6, ORF7, ORF8 and ORF9), and 4 structural proteins. The structural proteins are vital in viral assembly and infections, where they consist of spike (S) surface glycoprotein, membrane (M) protein, envelope (E) protein and nucleocapsid (N) protein (Li et al. 2020) (Figure 1). The S glycoprotein belongs to a type 1 membrane glycoprotein with different functional domains near the amino (S1) and carboxy (S2) termini. The S1 subunit is associated with receptor binding functions, while S1 subunit is primarily responsible for mediating the viral and cellular membrane fusion (Duan et al. 2020). The M protein, on the other hand can bind to all other structural proteins, which contribute to the nucleocapsid’s stabilization and completion of viral assembly (Astuti and Ysrafil 2020). On the other hand, the N protein in SARS-CoV-2 can lead to dysregulation of cell cycle in order to offer a better environment for itself to bind with viral RNA to form ribonucleocapsid, thus promoting virus replication, transcription as well as translation (McBride et al. 2014; Cong et al. 2020). Moreover, the E protein is not only involved in viral assembly but it is also crucial for viral infection and pathogenesis by functioning as a gated ion channel (Sarkar and Saha 2020).