Abstract
On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that the spread of the new coronavirus had reached the stage of a pandemic. To date (23.10.2020), there are more than 40 million confirmed cases of the disease in the world, at the same time there is still no effective treatment for the disease. For management and treatment of SARS-Cov2, the development of an antiviral drug is needed. Since the representatives of all human cultures have used medicinal plants to treat viral diseases throughout their history, plants can be considered as sources of new antiviral drug compounds against emerging viruses. The huge metabolic potential of plants allows us to expect discovery of plant compounds for the prevention and treatment of coronavirus infection. This idea is supported by number of papers on the anti-SARS-Cov2 activity of plant extracts and specific compounds in the experiments in silico, in vitro, and in vivo. Here, we summarize information on methods and approaches aimed to search for anti-SARS-Cov2 compounds including cheminformatics, bioinformatics, genetic engineering of viral targets, interacting with drugs, biochemical approaches etc. Our mini-review may be useful for better planning future experiments (including rapid methods for screening compounds for antiviral activity, the initial assessment of the antiviral potential of various plant species in relation to certain pathogens, etc.) and giving a hand to those who are making first steps in this field.
Highlights
A novel coronavirus strain causing fatal respiratory syndrome was reported in late 2019
In January 2020, it was revealed that it belongs to the beta-coronaviruses, sharing similarity to SARS-coronaviruses, and that its spike protein interacts strongly with the human angiotensinconverting enzyme 2 (ACE2) receptor (Dhama et al, 2020; Xu et al, 2020)
Plantbased medicine is attracting a lot of attention today, since medicinal plants are enriched with variety of secondary metabolites including those with antiviral properties (Gurib-Fakim, 2006; Adedeji and Sarafianos, 2014; Dhama et al, 2018; Divya et al, 2020; Vellingiri et al, 2020)
Summary
A novel coronavirus strain causing fatal respiratory syndrome was reported in late 2019. The PLpro, is attractive antiviral drug target, because it affects coronaviral replication, and has the additional function of deubiquitination of host cell proteins and ISG15 removal, leading to the immune suppression of host cells (Báez-Santos et al, 2015; Lin et al, 2018; Clemente et al, 2020). The viral S protein is essential for viral attachment, fusion, and entry It uses host angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) as a receptor to get into the host cells. The structure of S protein of SARS-CoV-2 is revealed (Coutard et al, 2020; Huang et al, 2020; Wrapp et al, 2020) and receptor-binding domain was identified, it can serve as a target for development of inhibitors of S protein and ACE2 interaction (Tai et al, 2020). Approaches to search for substances interacting with these targets will be described below together with successful examples of their application
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