Preliminary identification of potential vaccine targets for the COVID-19 coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) based on SARS-CoV immunological studies

Syed Faraz Ahmed; Ahmed A. Quadeer; Matthew R. McKay

These viruses mostly infect animals, including birds and mammals. In humans, they generally cause mild respiratory infections, such as those observed in the common cold. However, some recent human Like SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, the recent SARS-CoV-2 belongs to the Betacoronavirus genus (Lu et al., 2020) . It has a genome size of ~30 kilobases which, like other coronaviruses, encodes for multiple structural and non-structural proteins. The structural proteins include the spike (S) protein, the envelope (E) protein, the membrane (M) protein, and the nucleocapsid (N) protein. With SARS-CoV-2 being discovered very recently, there is currently a lack of immunological information available about the virus (e.g., information about immunogenic epitopes eliciting antibody or T cell responses). Preliminary studies suggest that SARS-CoV-2 is quite similar to SARS-CoV based on the full-length genome phylogenetic analysis (Lu et al., 2020; Zhou et al., 2020) , and the putatively similar cell entry mechanism and human cell receptor usage (Hoffmann et al., 2020; Letko & Munster, 2020; Zhou et al., 2020) . Due to this apparent similarity between the two viruses, previous research that has provided an understanding of protective immune responses against SARS-CoV may potentially be leveraged to aid vaccine development for SARS-CoV-2.