Abstract

  The Coronavirus outbreak has brought the Science fraternity to put some light on the history and evolution of the virus and also the design of the effective drug and its potential target. Coronavirus consists of a positive strand RNA genome and four characteristic structural proteins, active and viable below 560C. Surprisingly, all the strains of Coronaviruses are found to be residing in bats for long period of time along with the Malayan pangolins, a group of mammals. The SARS-CoV-2 has significant similarities with SARS-CoV and SARsSr- RaTGL3 in the sequences of conserved non-structural proteins and exhibit 96.2% genome similarity with SARsSr- RaTGL3 virus. However, a unique feature of SARS-CoV2 is the presence of the four amino acid residue sequence at S1/S2 junction which is required to be cleaved by Furin-like enzymes for efficient membrane fusion of host and the virus. This distinguishing feature gives a reason to become a promising factor for drug target studies. However, the infectious diseases could be effectively controlled by vaccine. Hence, there are some promising candidate vaccines entered into Phase III of Clinical trials designed by Sinovac, Moderna Inc and AstraZeneca/Oxford University in collaboration with Serum Institute of India.

Keywords: Coronavirus; SARS-CoV2; SARsSr- RaTGL3; Spike Proteins; Drug Target; Vaccine

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Citation

Citation: Priyanka Kulkarni and Jayant Londhe. “An Insight into the Coronavirus". Acta Scientific Microbiology 3.10 (2020): 70-74.

Copyright

Copyright: © 2020 Priyanka Kulkarni and Jayant Londhe. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.