From SARS to MERS, Thrusting Coronaviruses into the Spotlight

By Zhiqi Song, Yanfeng Xu, L. Bao, Ling Zhang, Pin Yu, Yajin Qu, Hua Zhu, Wenjie Zhao, Yunlin Han, C. Qin. Viruses, 2019

1,092 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Coronaviruses (CoVs) have formerly been regarded as relatively harmless respiratory pathogens to humans. However, two outbreaks of severe respiratory tract infection, caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV), as a result of zoonotic CoVs crossing the species barrier, caused high pathogenicity and mortality rates in human populations. This brought CoVs global attention and highlighted the importance of controlling infectious pathogens at international borders. In this review, we focus on our current understanding of the epidemiology, pathogenesis, prevention, and treatment of SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, as well as provides details on the pivotal structure and function of the spike proteins (S proteins) on the surface of each of these viruses. For building up more suitable animal models, we compare the current animal models recapitulating pathogenesis and summarize the potential role of host receptors contributing to diverse host affinity in various species. We outline the research still needed to fully elucidate the pathogenic mechanism of these viruses, to construct reproducible animal models, and ultimately develop countermeasures to conquer not only SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, but also these emerging coronaviral diseases.

Subfields: Animal Science and Zoology, Infectious Diseases

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/05192151667b1bb4e3405de11f6e4ae2f844e7c5

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In Infectious Diseases

1. David A. Schwartz
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Citations in the corpus

• Coronaviruses and the cardiovascular system: acute and long-term implications (2020, background): “The SARS outbreak in 2002 triggered 916 deaths among more than 8000 patients in 29 countries, followed by the emergence of MERS in 2012, which resulted in at least 800 deaths among 2254 patients in 27 countries.(2) Besides coronaviruses, avian and swine influenza remain a concern for global public h”
• Epidemiological and clinical characteristics of 99 cases of 2019 novel coronavirus pneumonia in Wuhan, China: a descriptive study (2020, methodology): “5, 18 At data cutoff for this study, mortality of the 99 included patients infected by 2019nCoV was 11%, resembling that in a previous study.”
• The origin, transmission and clinical therapies on coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak – an update on the status (2020, background): “It has been shown that the genome of CoVs contains a variable number (6–11) of open reading frames (ORFs) [20].”
• Remdesivir: A Review of Its Discovery and Development Leading to Emergency Use Authorization for Treatment of COVID-19 (2020, background): “4 Both coronaviruses likely emerged from native bat populations, which maintain a broad diversity of coronaviruses, and were transmitted through an intermediate host to humans.”
• AI-Driven Tools for Coronavirus Outbreak: Need of Active Learning and Cross-Population Train/Test Models on Multitudinal/Multimodal Data (2020, background): “At this point, it is important to note that coronavirus was not a surprise case, since several years ago, in 2003, a novel coronavirus was identified in patients with SARS, and it is thought to be caused by an unknown infectious agent [9] [10] [11] [12] .”
• COVID-19 and diabetes: Knowledge in progress (2020, neutral): “ACE2 is widely expressed on the respiratory tract, heart, kidneys, intestines, cerebral neurons, endothelium of arteries and veins, immune cells and pancreas [2].”
• Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2): An Update (2020, neutral): “Previous research had suggested that CoV infection in pregnant women may result in poor obstetric consequences, which include maternal morbidity and mortality [46-48].”
• Mental health of college students during the COVID-19 epidemic in China (2020, neutral): “The degree of impact of COVID on life is also a factor for college students’ anxiety, which might be related to the high contagiousness of the COVID-19 (Song et al., 2019).”
• Genome Composition and Divergence of the Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Originating in China (2020, background): “These include HCoV-NL63 and HCoV229E, which belong to the Alphacoronavirus genus; and HCoV-OC43, HCoVHKU1, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV), and Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV), which belong to the Beta- coronavirus genus (Tang et al., 2015).”
• The psychological impact of the COVID-19 epidemic on college students in China (2020, background): “Relatives or acquaintances being infected with COVID-19 was an independent risk factor in college students’ anxiety about the epidemic, which might be related to the high contagiousness of the new coronavirus pneumonia (World Health Organization, 2020; Song et al., 2019).”
• Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19): current status and future perspectives (2020, background): “002, an outbreak of SARS was first reported in China and then pread quickly worldwide, resulting in hundreds of deaths with an 1% mortality rate [3 , 4] .”
• The deadly coronaviruses: The 2003 SARS pandemic and the 2020 novel coronavirus epidemic in China (2020, neutral): “Although vaccines have been developed for SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, these are not commercially available [12, 14, 141] .”
• A Sequence Homology and Bioinformatic Approach Can Predict Candidate Targets for Immune Responses to SARS-CoV-2 (2020, neutral): “Although no epitope data are yet available for SARS-CoV-2, there is a significant body of information about epitopes for coronaviruses in general, and in particular for Betacoronaviruses like SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, which cause respiratory disease in humans (de Wit et al., 2016; Song et al., 2019).”