In-depth Bioinformatic Analyses of Human SARS-CoV-2, SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV, and Other Nidovirales Suggest Important Roles of Noncanonical Nucleic Acid Structures in Their Lifecycles

Martin Bartas; Václav Brázda; Natália Bohálová; Alessio Cantara; Adriana Volná; Tereza Stachurová; Katerina Malachová; Eva B. Jagelská; Otília Porubiaková; Jirí Cerven; Petr Pecinka

Targeting viral proteins is usually effective only against specific viral strains and fails even for closely related viral species. It appears that targeting host proteins should be able to provide a response toward a wider spectrum of viruses inasmuch as different viruses exploit common cellular pathways. Many . CC-BY-ND 4.0 International license author/funder. It is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the . https: //doi.org/10.1101 //doi.org/10. /2020 This is a provisional file, not the final typeset article cellular RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) containing well-established RNA-binding domains (RBDs) are known to be critical for infection by different viruses. Recently, 472 RBPs were reviewed for their linkage to viruses (Garcia-Moreno et al., 2018) . It has been demonstrated that G-quadruplex formation in HIV-1 viral genome stalls RNA polymerase, thereby limiting viral replication in host cells. HIV-1 nucleocapsid protein NCp7 helps to resolve G-quadruplex formation and therefore enables virus to spread. Stabilization of this quadruplex has been targeted by several experimental compounds. This treatment slowed or inhibited viral growth (Butovskaya et al., 2019) .