Human Coronaviruses: General Features

Reference Module in Biomedical Sciences
2019

ARTICLE IN PRESS

Xin Li, Hayes K. H. Luk, Susanna K. P. Lau, Patrick C. Y. Woo

Abstract

Human coronaviruses (HCoVs), including HCoV-229E, HCoV-OC43, HCoV-NL63, and HCoV-HKU1, are traditionally known to cause symptoms of common cold with only moderate clinical impact. Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV), on the other hand, have strike humans in the past two decades as highly fatal human pathogens leading to considerable mortality and economic loss. This article summaries the updates on the structure, genome organization, replication and clinical features of human coronaviruses. Recent studies also shed light upon the zoonotic origin of emerging human pathogens including SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, providing insight for future surveillance and intervention.

Keywords

Epidemiology, Genome, Human coronavirus, MERS, Replication, SARS, Structure

ZCURVE_CoV: a new system to recognize protein coding genes in coronavirus genomes, and its applications in analyzing SARS-CoV genomes

Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications
Volume 307 (2003), Pages 382–388

Ling-Ling Chen, Hong-Yu Ou, Ren Zhang, and Chun-Ting Zhanga.

Abstract

A new system to recognize protein coding genes in the coronavirus genomes, specially suitable for the SARS-CoV genomes, has been proposed in this paper. Compared with some existing systems, the new program package has the merits of simplicity, high accuracy, reliability, and quickness. The system ZCURVE_CoV has been run for each of the 11 newly sequenced SARS-CoV genomes. Consequently, six genomes not annotated previously have been annotated, and some problems of previous annotations in the remaining five genomes have been pointed out and discussed. In addition to the polyprotein chain ORFs 1a and 1b and the four genes coding for the major structural proteins, spike (S), small envelop (E), membrane (M), and nuleocaspid (N), respectively, ZCURVE_CoV also predicts 5–6 putative proteins in length between 39 and 274 amino acids with unknown functions. Some single nucleotide mutations within these putative coding sequences have been detected and their biological implications are discussed. A web service is provided, by which a user can obtain the annotated result immediately by pasting the SARS-CoV genome sequences into the input window on the web site (http://tubic.tju.edu.cn/sars/). The software ZCURVE_CoV can also be downloaded freely from the web address mentioned above and run in computers under the platforms of Windows or Linux.
2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Keywords

Coronavirus, Severe acute respiratory syndrome, SARS-CoV, Genome, Gene-finding, Mutation