The SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) originated in China in 2019 and rapidly spread across the globe for which the World Health Organization (WHO) declared it as a pandemic on March 11, 2020. This viral disease is extremely contagious and infectious in nature and the general symptoms include fever, cough and pneumonia followed by a loss of taste, diarrhoea, shortness of breath, acute respiratory distress syndrome and even death. The disease has caused unprecedented risk against the global fitness scenario and therefore have altered the socio-economic-political structure of society. There has been no reported cases of any immunity against the virus, however immune-compromised people are extremely vulnerable to this disease.  The diagnosis of the disease is usually done by quantitative Real-time PCR but other methods of detection like serological testing is gaining prominence these days.  Approaches are directed towards the development of vaccine candidates and a search is on towards the discovery of potential drugs. Needless to say, the genome architecture of the virus and the viral proteins mounting an immune response play a key role in the development of effective therapeutic strategies. The review article presents an overview of the science behind the pandemic along with the structural chemistry of the pathogen, the prognosis and the vaccine candidates in different stages of development. The review would be beneficial to the scientific fraternity and the common men at large in understanding the central role of the immune system towards the development of successful clinical strategies for diagnosis and therapy to avoid the future encounters by the virus.

Moringa oleifera is native to India and is one of the most useful tree with an enormous amount of benefits in the world. Numerous research reports have appeared in different national and international scientific journals by studying its nutritional and medicinal properties over the past decades. Different reports also show that due to its multipurpose uses, it has recently got attention in different countries. It is a tree that is sometimes called a miracle tree as all its parts are used for nutritional and pharmacological properties. It is a very valuable food tree which is highly nutritive, grows very fast and having drought resistant characteristics. It can also play an important role in soil and water conservation and is very helpful for mitigating climate change. This study provides a brief overview about the multipurpose uses of Moringa oleifera and its implication in climate change mitigation.

To produce the essential secondary metabolites, plants are the major and important target source materials for conducting the high-profile metabolic engineering studies. Metabolic pathway engineering of both microorganism targets and plants target contribute towards important drug discovery. In order to efficiently work out in advanced plant metabolic pathway engineering techniques, a detailed knowledge and expertise is essentially needed regarding the plant cell physiology and the mechanics of plant metabolism. Mathematical and statistical models to scale and map the genome for integrative metabolic pathway activity, signal transduction mechanism in the genome, gene regulation and the networks of protein-protein interaction can provide the in-depth knowledge to work efficiently on plant metabolic pathway engineering studies. Incorporation of omics data into these statistical and mathematical models is crucial in the case of drug discovery using the plant system. Recently, artificial intelligence concept and approaches are experimentally applied for efficient and accurate metabolic engineering in plants.

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