Measures for diagnosing and treating infections by a novel coronavirus responsible for a pneumonia outbreak originating in Wuhan, China

Abstract

On 10 January 2020, a new coronavirus causing a pneumonia outbreak in Wuhan City in central China was denoted as 2019-nCoV by the World Health Organization (WHO). As of 24 January 2020, there were 887 confirmed cases of 2019-nCoV infection, including 26 deaths, reported in China and other countries. Therefore, combating this new virus and stopping the epidemic is a matter of urgency. Here, we focus on advances in research and development of fast diagnosis methods, as well as potential prophylactics and therapeutics to prevent or treat 2019-nCoV infection.

Keywords: 2019-nCoV; Diagnosis; Preventive; Therapeutic.

Fig. 1

Comparison of S protein sequences of coronaviruses. Multiple alignment of full amino acid sequences of S protein from 2019-nCoV (GISAID accession no. EPI_ISL_402124), SARS-CoV (GenBank accession no. AY278489), bat-SL-CoVZC45 (GenBank accession no. MG772933.1), and bat-SL-CoVZXC21 (GenBank accession no. MG772934.1) was performed and displayed with clustalx1.83 and MEGA4 respectively. ‘‘-” represents the unconfirmed amino acid residues, “.” represents the identical amino acid residues. The functional domains were labeled based on the research on SARS-CoV [41]; light blue box was for RBD region; dark blue box for receptor binding motif (RBM); light purple box for HR1; and dark purple box for HR2, respectively. Double underlined regions in HR1 and HR2 are fusion cores, which are critical regions responsible for the formation of stable six-helical bundles between HR1 and HR2.