Dark Proteome of Newly Emerged SARS-CoV-2 in Comparison with Human and Bat Coronaviruses

Rajanish Giri; Taniya Bhardwaj; Meenakshi Shegane; Bhuvaneshwari R. Gehi; Prateek Kumar; Kundlik Gadhave

Molecular recognition features (MoRFs) are short interaction-prone disordered regions found within IDPs/IDPRs that commence a disorder-to-order transition upon binding to their partners [47, 48] . These regions are important for protein-protein interactions and may initiate an early step in molecular recognition [48] . In this study, we have analyzed and compared MoRFs (protein-binding regions) in SARS-CoV-2 with Human SARS and Bat CoV. The results of this analysis are summarized in Table 2 , which clearly shows that most of the SARS-CoV-2 proteins contain at least one MoRF, indicating that disorder does play an important role in the functionality of these viral proteins. All of the SARS-CoV-2 proteins have been predicted to contain MoRFs except ORF7b and Nsp13 proteins for which none of the predictors have located any MoRF. MoRFs in Human SARS and Bat CoV proteomes are listed in Supplementary Tables 7 and 8 . Similar to SARS-CoV-2 proteome, Bat CoV proteins ORF7b, and Nsp13 were not predicted to have any MoRF by any of the servers used. In Human SARS proteome the proteins ORF7b, Nsp13, Nsp2, and Nsp15 proteins does not show the presence of any MoRF. Interestingly, structural N protein from SARS-CoV-2, Human SARS, and Bat CoV shows high number of short and long MoRF regions, signifying its central role in virus pathogenesis.