Abstract
Flaviviruses are still a hidden threat to global human safety, as we are reminded by recent reports of dengue virus infections in Singapore and African-lineage-like Zika virus infections in Brazil. Therapeutic drugs or vaccines for flavivirus infections are in urgent need but are not well developed. The Flaviviridae family comprises a large group of enveloped viruses with a single-strand RNA genome of positive polarity. The genome of flavivirus encodes ten proteins, and each of them plays a different and important role in viral infection. In this review, we briefly summarized the major information of flavivirus and further introduced some strategies for the design and development of vaccines and anti-flavivirus compound drugs based on the structure of the viral proteins. There is no doubt that in the past few years, studies of antiviral drugs have achieved solid progress based on better understanding of the flavivirus biology. However, currently, there are no fully effective antiviral drugs or vaccines for most flaviviruses. We hope that this review may provide useful information for future development of anti-flavivirus drugs and vaccines.
Highlights
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This class includes more than 70 types of small envelope viruses, including the most recognized dengue virus (DENV), Zika virus (ZIKV), West Nile virus (WNV), yellow fever virus (YFV), Japanese encephalitis virus (JEV), Tick-borne encephalitis virus (TBEV), etc
In the previous designs of flavivirus vaccines and therapeutic targets, researchers focused their attention on the E protein of the viral envelope
Summary
The genome of flavivirus encodes a long open reading fame flanked by a capped 5-terminal and lacks the poly tail of the 3-terminal (Figure 1a). Under the cooperation of virus and cell protease, the translated single polypeptide is cleaved into three structural proteins, namely capsid protein (C protein), pre-membrane protein (prM protein), envelope protein (E protein), and seven non-structural (NS) proteins, namely, non-structural protein 1 (NS1), NS2A, NS2B, NS3, NS4A, NS4B, and NS5 (Figure 1b). These proteins constitute the main structural components of virus particles, and participate in the key steps of the viral life cycle [2,44,45,46,47,48,49]
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