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Clinical Trials of COVID-19 Therapeutics and Vaccines
Published in Debmalya Barh, Kenneth Lundstrom, COVID-19, 2022
Candan Hizel Perry, Havva Ö. Kılgöz, Şükrü Tüzmen
Over the past decade, three Coronaviruses from the Beta (β)-coronavirus genus have been discovered: Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) caused the SARS outbreak in 2002 [1], and the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) was identified in the 2012 MERS outbreak [2]. In 2019, following a cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan City, China, the novel zoonotic (“spill over” from animals to people) SARS-CoV-2 was identified as the causative agent of COVID-19 [3, 4]. Having 79.5% nucleotide identity with SARS-CoV, SARS-CoV-2 caused global health concern along with an unprecedented challenge to identify effective drugs and vaccines for prevention and treatment [5, 6]. SARS-CoV-2 is a highly contagious single-stranded RNA (ssRNA) virus, with almost 30,000 bases encoding four viral structural proteins including spike (S), envelope (E), membrane (M), and nucleocapsid (N) proteins, 16 non-structural proteins (NSP1-16), and various accessory proteins (ORF3a, ORF6, ORF7a, ORF7b, ORF 8 and ORF10) [7]. It has been revealed that primary transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is through person-to-person respiratory droplets/close contact and fomite transmission [8–10].
Human bronchial-pulmonary proteomics in coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic: applications and implications
Published in Expert Review of Proteomics, 2021
Heng Wee Tan, Yan-Ming Xu, Andy T. Y. Lau
Interactions between virus and host membrane proteins are crucial for the viral lifecycle. Using BioID proximity labelling technique, St-Germain et al. [97] showed that SARS-CoV-2 proteins predicted with at least one transmembrane domain (spike, envelope, membrane, NSP3, NSP4, NSP6, ORF3A, ORF7A, and ORF7B), along with a few non-membrane-associated but poorly understood proteins (ORF3B, ORF6, ORF8, and ORF9B), were able to interact with a range of host membrane-associated proteins, such as those involved in intracellular vesicle trafficking pathways (e.g. cholesterol and lipid) and endoplasmic reticulum-related membrane contact site (MCS) components. It was proposed that the human MCS lipid transfer system might be an attractive drug target for COVID-19 [97]. Curated data of their work can be found at BioGRID (www.thebiogrid.org) [98], a database that holds over 1.7 million protein, genetic, or chemical interactions obtained from humans and other model organisms.
The vital role of animal, marine, and microbial natural products against COVID-19
Published in Pharmaceutical Biology, 2022
Aljawharah A. Alqathama, Rizwan Ahmad, Ruba B. Alsaedi, Raghad A. Alghamdi, Ekram H. Abkar, Rola H. Alrehaly, Ashraf N. Abdalla
The accessory proteins belong to another class of proteins encoded in SARS-CoV-2 and are less well-known compared to the rest. There are two major reasons for this; first, they are not essential or part of viral structure/replication, however, they play a role in viral spread and pathogenicity. Second, predicting protein complexity by bioinformatics is challenging due to their complex nature as short and overlapping ORFs (Michel et al. 2020). Five ORFs encoding accessory genes (ORF3a, ORF6, ORF7a, ORF7b, and ORF8) encode nine accessory proteins including ORF3a, 3d, 6, 7a, 7b, 8, 9b, 14, and 10 and N gene (ORF9b and 14) encodes novel overlapping ORF3d (earlier known as 3b) (Yadav et al. 2021).