Composition and divergence of coronavirus spike proteins and host ACE2 receptors predict potential intermediate hosts of SARS‐CoV‐2
By Zhixin Liu, Xiao Xiao, Xiuli Wei, Jian Li, Jing Yang, Huabing Tan, Jianyong Zhu, Qiwei Zhang, Jianguo Wu, Long Liu. Journal of Medical Virology, 2020
642 citations recorded by the source corpus.
From the beginning of 2002 and 2012, severe respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS‐CoV) and Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS‐CoV) crossed the species barriers to infect humans, causing thousands of infections and hundreds of deaths, respectively. Currently, a novel coronavirus (SARS‐CoV‐2), which has become the cause of the outbreak of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID‐19), was discovered. Until 18 February 2020, there were 72 533 confirmed COVID‐19 cases (including 10 644 severe cases) and 1872 deaths in China. SARS‐CoV‐2 is spreading among the public and causing substantial burden due to its human‐to‐human transmission. However, the intermediate host of SARS‐CoV‐2 is still unclear. Finding the possible intermediate host of SARS‐CoV‐2 is imperative to prevent further spread of the epidemic. In this study, we used systematic comparison and analysis to predict the interaction between the receptor‐binding domain (RBD) of coronavirus spike protein and the host receptor, angiotensin‐converting enzyme 2 (ACE2). The interaction between the key amino acids of S protein RBD and ACE2 indicated that, other than pangolins and snakes, as previously suggested, turtles (Chrysemys picta bellii, Chelonia mydas, and Pelodiscus sinensis) may act as the potential intermediate hosts transmitting SARS‐CoV‐2 to humans.
Subfields: Infectious Diseases, Modeling and Simulation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/05be6fc36dfaa563b03e6003d3424034eee5ee38
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Citations in the corpus
- Laboratory Diagnosis of COVID-19: Current Issues and Challenges (2020, background): “SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 bind to human angiotensin-converting enzyme 2, which is found on human respiratory cells, renal cells, and gastrointestinal cells (57, 65, 66).”
- The origin, transmission and clinical therapies on coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak – an update on the status (2020, background): “phylogenetic analysis [15] showed that similar residues of receptor were observed in many species, which provided more possibility of alternative intermediate hosts, such as turtles, pangolin and snacks.”
- The presence of SARS‐CoV‐2 RNA in the feces of COVID‐19 patients (2020, background): “revealed that the S1 domain of the spikeprotein of SARS‐CoV‐2 attaches the virus to its cellular receptor ACE2 on the host cells.(21,22) And after viral entry, virus‐specific RNA and proteins could be synthesized in the cytoplasm to assemble new virions,(23) which can be released to the gastrointest”