Investigating the genomic landscape in novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) genomes to identify non-synonymous mutations for use in diagnosis and drug design

Manish Tiwari; Divya Mishra

The alpha and beta CoVs infect mammals whereas the gamma and delta CoVs infect birds (Tang et al., 2015) . Primary symptoms associated with CoV infection include respiratory, hepatic, enteric and neurological diseases. Previous investigation showed that there are 6 type of CoVs (hCoV-NL63, hCoV-229E, hCoV-OC43, hCoV-HKU1, SARS-CoV, and MERS-CoV) which can infect the human species. HCoV-NL63, hCoV-229E belongs to alphaCoV genus while rest belongs to betaCoV genus. (Tang et al., 2015) . The betaCoVs appears to be prima-facie genre of CoVs which will peril universal human to 11 open reading frames (ORFs) (Song et al., 2019) . Viral genome encodes for 4 major structural proteins namely envelope (E), spike (S), membrane (M) and 3-5 nucleocapsid (N) proteins. The genome starts with short untranslated regions (5' UTR) followed by genes 5′replicase (rep gene), S, E, M, N and 3' UTR (Song et al., 2019) . Two-third of the genome is represented by t h e rep gene at 5' end which encodes for non-structural protein (Nsp). Spike author/funder. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission.