The emergence of SARS, MERS and novel SARS-2 coronaviruses in the 21st century

Abstract

At the beginning of the 21st century, a new deadly infectious disease known as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) was recognized as a global public health threat. Subsequently, ten years after the initial SARS cases occurred in 2002, new cases of another atypical respiratory disease caused worldwide concern. This disease became known as Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) and was even more lethal than SARS. Currently, history has repeated itself with the emergence of a new Chinese epidemic at the end of 2019. For this respiratory disease, called COVID-19, a novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) was identified as the etiologic agent. In sum, SARS, MERS and COVID-19 are caused by recently discovered coronaviruses that cause flu-like illnesses, but with a clinical outcome that tends to be more severe. As a result of the current importance of coronaviruses in global public health, we conducted a review to summarize and update, above all, the epidemiological historical aspects of the three major diseases in humans caused by coronaviral infection.Handling Editor: Yue Wang. Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (https ://doi.org/10.1007/s0070 5-020-04628 -0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.Publisher's Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Discovery of Synergistic and Antagonistic Drug Combinations against SARS-CoV-2 In Vitro

“…al 2020. 46 Next, we used Chemotext to determine if these compounds had been tested together before. One capability of Chemotext is finding papers that share two search terms, in this case, the names of compound #1 and compound #2, and returning these common papers by the MeSH terms found in these papers.…”

Integrate Structural Analysis, Isoform Diversity, and Interferon-Inductive Propensity of ACE2 to Refine SARS-CoV2 Susceptibility Prediction in Vertebrates

“…Erupting in China last December, the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has become a worldwide pandemic and caused near 0.4 million confirmed deaths and 6 million infected cases across 200 countries by the end of May 2020 [1,2]. The etiological virus, designated as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV2) has been identified [3] and related to the viruses previously causing SARS or Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) in humans in 2003 and 2012, respectively [4]. These three human-pathogenic coronaviruses putatively evolve from bat coronaviruses, but have different animal tropisms and intermediate reservoirs before transmission to humans [4,5].…”

“…The etiological virus, designated as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV2) has been identified [3] and related to the viruses previously causing SARS or Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) in humans in 2003 and 2012, respectively [4]. These three human-pathogenic coronaviruses putatively evolve from bat coronaviruses, but have different animal tropisms and intermediate reservoirs before transmission to humans [4,5]. As civet cats and camels were retrospectively determined as reservoirs for SARS and MERS respectively, there is no conclusion about what animal species passing SARS-CoV2 to humans [4,5].…”

“…These three human-pathogenic coronaviruses putatively evolve from bat coronaviruses, but have different animal tropisms and intermediate reservoirs before transmission to humans [4,5]. As civet cats and camels were retrospectively determined as reservoirs for SARS and MERS respectively, there is no conclusion about what animal species passing SARS-CoV2 to humans [4,5]. Investigations indicated that Canivora animals including raccoon dogs, red foxes, badgers and minks as well swine, at a less extent, are susceptible to SARS virus infections [6,7].…”

“…For example, MERS-CoV adopts the dipeptidyl peptidase 4 (DPP4, a.k.a. CD26) and SARS-CoV uses angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) as primary receptors for cell attachment and entry [4][5][6][7][8][9]. Several groups have reported that SARS-CoV2 uses the same ACE2 receptor as SARS-CoV, but exerts higher receptor affinity to human ACE2, which may ascribe to the efficacy of SARS-CoV2 infection in humans [11,12].…”