Avoiding Regions Symptomatic of Conformational and Functional Flexibility to Identify Antiviral Targets in Current and Future Coronaviruses

Rahaman, Jordon; Siltberg-Liberles, Jessica

Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS)-CoV and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS)-CoV are two closely related zoonotic coronaviruses. Both have successfully crossed the species barrier to allow animal-to-human transmission, and further to allow human-to-human transmission (Song et al. 2005; Reusken et al. 2016) . The SARS outbreak in 2003 had a mortality rate of 10% (Anderson et al. 2010) , and SARS-CoV was considered the most aggressive coronavirus compared to other human coronaviruses that commonly cause mild to moderate infection in their hosts (van der Hoek 2007) . MERS-CoV is the cause of an ongoing outbreak of the respiratory illness MERS (de Groot et al. 2013) . At the time of writing, 1791 MERS cases have been confirmed with a mortality rate of approximately 35% (World Health Organization 2016). Both MERS and SARS have higher mortality rates in elderly and immunosuppressed populations (Gralinski and Baric 2015) .