CoronaPep: An Anti-Coronavirus Peptide Generation Tool

Abstract

The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) infections have adopted the shape of a global pandemic now, demanding an urgent vaccine design. The current work reports contriving an anti-coronavirus peptide scanner tool to discern anti-coronavirus targets in the embodiment of peptides. The proffered CoronaPep tool features the fast fingerprinting of the anti-coronavirus target serving supreme prominence in the current bioinformatics research. The anti-coronavirus target protein sequences reported from the current outbreak are scanned against the anti-coronavirus target data-sets via CORONAPEP which provides precision-based anti-coronavirus peptides. This tool is specifically for the coronavirus data, which can predict peptides from the whole genome, or a gene or protein's list. Besides it is relatively fast, accurate, userfriendly and can generate maximum output from the limited information. The availability of tools like CORONAPEP will immeasurably perquisite researchers in the discipline of oncology and structure-based drug design.

Fig. 1.

This figure shows depict the overall background operations of the CORONAPEP tool during the generation of anti-coronavirus peptides. Various steps from input data requirements to the final output detail are graphically produced. The data is provided manually or in the form of the required formats which is scanned for additional information by accessing the gene information at the NCBI database and is stored locally which is later fetched for the incorporation of mutations and checking various properties to predict the final peptide that might have a better affinity with the target.

Fig. 2.

Overview of the key steps taken during the peptide prediction for the Coronavirus via the CORONAPEP tool. Input files are used. Once the job is submitted, these files are used to extract information such as oncogenes, and mutations along with their exact positions. Subsequently, the CORONAPEP draws all the sequences’ information one by one from the user's home directory and mutates them based on the clinical data.

Fig. 3:

The GUI screenshots of the CORONAPEP tool, showing the fetched gene sequence.