Structural Genomics of SARS-CoV-2 Indicates Evolutionary Conserved Functional Regions of Viral Proteins

Viruses. 2020 Mar 25;12(4):360. doi: 10.3390/v12040360.

Abstract

During its first two and a half months, the recently emerged 2019 novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, has already infected over one-hundred thousand people worldwide and has taken more than four thousand lives. However, the swiftly spreading virus also caused an unprecedentedly rapid response from the research community facing the unknown health challenge of potentially enormous proportions. Unfortunately, the experimental research to understand the molecular mechanisms behind the viral infection and to design a vaccine or antivirals is costly and takes months to develop. To expedite the advancement of our knowledge, we leveraged data about the related coronaviruses that is readily available in public databases and integrated these data into a single computational pipeline. As a result, we provide comprehensive structural genomics and interactomics roadmaps of SARS-CoV-2 and use this information to infer the possible functional differences and similarities with the related SARS coronavirus. All data are made publicly available to the research community.

Keywords: 2019 novel coronavirus; 2019-nCoV; COVID-19; SARS-CoV-2; interactome; protein-protein interactions; structural genomics.

Publication types

  • Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural
  • Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

MeSH terms

  • Animals
  • Betacoronavirus / chemistry
  • Betacoronavirus / genetics*
  • Binding Sites
  • Biological Evolution
  • COVID-19
  • Chiroptera / virology
  • Computational Biology
  • Conserved Sequence
  • Coronavirus Infections
  • Coronavirus Nucleocapsid Proteins
  • Genome, Viral
  • Genomics
  • Humans
  • Ligands
  • Models, Molecular
  • Nucleocapsid Proteins / chemistry
  • Pandemics
  • Phosphoproteins
  • Phylogeny
  • Pneumonia, Viral
  • Protein Interaction Mapping
  • Protein Structure, Tertiary
  • SARS-CoV-2
  • Sequence Alignment
  • Severe acute respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus
  • Spike Glycoprotein, Coronavirus / chemistry
  • Viral Envelope Proteins / chemistry
  • Viral Matrix Proteins / chemistry
  • Viral Proteins / genetics*

Substances

  • Coronavirus Nucleocapsid Proteins
  • Ligands
  • Nucleocapsid Proteins
  • Phosphoproteins
  • Spike Glycoprotein, Coronavirus
  • Viral Envelope Proteins
  • Viral Matrix Proteins
  • Viral Proteins
  • nucleocapsid phosphoprotein, SARS-CoV-2
  • spike protein, SARS-CoV-2