The spike glycoprotein of the new coronavirus 2019-nCoV contains a furin-like cleavage site absent in CoV of the same clade

By B. Coutard, Coralie Valle, X. Lamballerie, Bruno Canard, N. Seidah, E. Decroly. Antiviral Research, 2020

1,548 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In 2019, a new coronavirus (2019-nCoV) infecting Humans has emerged in Wuhan, China. Its genome has been sequenced and the genomic information promptly released. Despite a high similarity with the genome sequence of SARS-CoV and SARS-like CoVs, we identified a peculiar furin-like cleavage site in the Spike protein of the 2019-nCoV, lacking in the other SARS-like CoVs. In this article, we discuss the possible functional consequences of this cleavage site in the viral cycle, pathogenicity and its potential implication in the development of antivirals.

Subfields: Animal Science and Zoology, Immunology, Infectious Diseases

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3220b2499f969416e3658ffa9a910b9425e0f1a1

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Animal Science and Zoology

1. Ralph S. Baric

In Immunology

1. Aviv Regev
2. A. Misharin
3. Joachim L. Schultze

In Infectious Diseases

1. Ralph S. Baric
2. Joachim L. Schultze
3. P. Masters
4. Fang Li

Citations in the corpus

• SARS-CoV-2 Reverse Genetics Reveals a Variable Infection Gradient in the Respiratory Tract (2020, positive): “SARS-CoV-2 S protein exhibits a novel 4 amino acid (aa) furincleavage site ‘‘RRAR’’ at the junction between S1 and S2 subunits (Andersen et al., 2020; Coutard et al., 2020).”
• Current Status of Epidemiology, Diagnosis, Therapeutics, and Vaccines for Novel Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) (2020, background): “The spike (S) protein of coronaviruses is an important target for vaccine development because it mediates the infection mechanism through receptor binding of host cells [65-67].”
• Probable Pangolin Origin of SARS-CoV-2 Associated with the COVID-19 Outbreak (2020, neutral): “We found that the SARS-CoV-2 S protein contains a putative furin recognition motif (PRRARSV) (Figure 4) similar to that of MERS-CoV, which has a PRSVRSVmotif that is likely cleaved by furin [16, 17] during virus egress.”
• TMPRSS2 and furin are both essential for proteolytic activation of SARS-CoV-2 in human airway cells (2020, background): “Thus, we could experimentally demonstrate for the first time that furin only activates the S1/S2 site, as expected from the amino acid sequence at the cleavage sites (22, 23).”
• SARS-CoV-2 Receptor ACE2 Is an Interferon-Stimulated Gene in Human Airway Epithelial Cells and Is Detected in Specific Cell Subsets across Tissues (2020, positive): “Importantly, rapidly evolving literature has identified that SARS-CoV-2-Smight have a furin cleavage site, leading to a broader set of host proteases that could mediate S protein activation (Bugge et al., 2009; Coutard et al., 2020; Walls et al., 2020).”
• An Infectious cDNA Clone of SARS-CoV-2 (2020, neutral): “A four-amino-acid insertion (conferring a possible furin cleavage site) was reported in the spike (S) protein of SARS-CoV-2 but is absent in the S protein of SARS-CoV and other group-2B CoVs (Coutard et al., 2020) .”
• COVID-19: Epidemiology, Evolution, and Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives (2020, positive): “Interestingly, S of 2019-nCoV has acquired a polybasic motif at the S1/S2 boundary, which is not present in S of the bat CoVs and SARS-CoV [68].”