The epidemic of 2019-novel-coronavirus (2019-nCoV) pneumonia and insights for emerging infectious diseases in the future

Abstract

At the end of December 2019, a novel coronavirus, 2019-nCoV, caused an outbreak of pneumonia spreading from Wuhan, Hubei province, to the whole country of China, which has posed great threats to public health and attracted enormous attention around the world. To date, there are no clinically approved vaccines or antiviral drugs available for these human coronavirus infections. Intensive research on the novel emerging human infectious coronaviruses is urgently needed to elucidate their route of transmission and pathogenic mechanisms, and to identify potential drug targets, which would promote the development of effective preventive and therapeutic countermeasures. Herein, we describe the epidemic and etiological characteristics of 2019-nCoV, discuss its essential biological features, including tropism and receptor usage, summarize approaches for disease prevention and treatment, and speculate on the transmission route of 2019-nCoV.

Keywords: 2019-nCoV; ACE2; Bat; Pneumonia; SARS-CoV; Spike.

Fig. 1

The evolutionary position of 2019-nCoV. The phylogenetic tree was constructed based on the complete genomic sequences of 2019-nCoV and related CoVs by using the neighbor-joining (NJ) method with 1000 bootstrap. The novel 2019-nCoV detected strains were indicated in bold with solid squares. Abbreviations are as follows: SARSr coronavirus, SARS-related coronavirus. The accession numbers of CoVs were showed in the figure. Bootstrap values above 50 were shown.

Fig. 2

Phylogenetic analysis of ACE2 from humans and 18 other animals. The tree was constructed based on the complete amino acid sequences of ACE2s derived from humans and other animals by using the neighbor-joining (NJ) method with 1000 bootstrap. The accession numbers were as the same as Table 2. Bootstrap values above 50 were shown.