The analysis on the human protein domain targets and host-like interacting motifs for the MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV/CoV-2 infers the molecular mimicry of coronavirus.

Yamelie A Martínez,Carlos A García-Pérez,Xianwu Guo,José A Enciso-Moreno,Gildardo Rivera,Julio E Castañeda-Delgado,Edgar E Lara-Ramírez,Diana P Portales-Pérez

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0246901

Abstract

The MERS-CoV, SARS-CoV, and SARS-CoV-2 are highly pathogenic viruses that can cause severe pneumonic diseases in humans. Unfortunately, there is a non-available effective treatment to combat these viruses. Domain-motif interactions (DMIs) are an essential means by which viruses mimic and hijack the biological processes of host cells. To disentangle how viruses achieve this process can help to develop new rational therapies. Data mining was performed to obtain DMIs stored as regular expressions (regexp) in 3DID and ELM databases. The mined regexp information was mapped on the coronaviruses’ proteomes. Most motifs on viral protein that could interact with human proteins are shared across the coronavirus species, indicating that molecular mimicry is a common strategy for coronavirus infection. Enrichment ontology analysis for protein domains showed a shared biological process and molecular function terms related to carbon source utilization and potassium channel regulation. Some of the mapped motifs were nested on B, and T cell epitopes, suggesting that it could be as an alternative way for reverse vaccinology. The information obtained in this study could be used for further theoretic and experimental explorations on coronavirus infection mechanism and development of medicines for treatment.

Highlights

Coronaviruses (CoV) are enveloped single-stranded, positive-sense RNA viruses, responsible very often for mild upper respiratory infections in humans
Contrariwise to the previous researches, we focused on the motifs mapped on the MERS-CoV, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)-CoV, and SARS-CoV-2 proteomes linked to human protein domains
After removing duplicate gene names among the reviewed publications, 497 human genes for SARS-CoV/CoV-2 and 65 for MERS-CoV infection were found involved in pathogenesis (Table 2, data in S2 File)

Summary

Introduction

Coronaviruses (CoV) are enveloped single-stranded, positive-sense RNA viruses, responsible very often for mild upper respiratory infections in humans. The first one appeared in 2003 in Guangdong, China, leading to an epidemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and this virus was named SARS-CoV [1]. At the end of 2019, a new CoV emerged in Wuhan, China, causing severe pneumonia [3] and was named SARS-CoV-2 due to its genomic similarity with the past SARS-CoV [4]. This is the first CoV that caused a pandemic disease termed COVID-19. Numerous efforts are currently underway to develop drugs and vaccines to combat those viruses, there is no effective treatment available yet

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Conclusion