Coronavirus membrane fusion mechanism offers a potential target for antiviral drug development

By Tiffany Tang, Miya K. Bidon, Javier A. Jaimes, Gary R. Whittaker, S. Daniel. Antiviral Research, 2020

680 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has focused attention on the need to develop effective therapies against the causative agent, SARS-CoV-2, and also against other pathogenic coronaviruses (CoV) that have emerged in the past or might appear in future. Researchers are therefore focusing on steps in the CoV replication cycle that may be vulnerable to inhibition by broad-spectrum or specific antiviral agents. The conserved nature of the fusion domain and mechanism across the CoV family make it a valuable target to elucidate and develop pan-CoV therapeutics. In this article, we review the role of the CoV spike protein in mediating fusion of the viral and host cell membranes, summarizing the results of research on SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV, and recent peer-reviewed studies of SARS-CoV-2, and suggest that the fusion mechanism be investigated as a potential antiviral target. We also provide a supplemental file containing background information on the biology, epidemiology, and clinical features of all human-infecting coronaviruses, along with a phylogenetic tree of these coronaviruses.

Subfields: Animal Science and Zoology, Infectious Diseases

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4ec0e5f89a4bfeb4453374933b18992195d08e67

Citations in the corpus

• Insights into SARS-CoV-2 genome, structure, evolution, pathogenesis and therapies: Structural genomics approach (2020, neutral): “M proteins are 222 amino acid long structural proteins that function in concurrence with E, N, and S proteins, and plays a major role in the RNA packaging [67].”