Computational Prediction of the Comprehensive SARS-CoV-2 vs. Human Interactome to Guide the Design of Therapeutics

Kevin Dick; Kyle K Biggar; James R Green

Certainly, if the SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV Spike proteins share sufficient sequence and structural similairty, it can be expected that anti-virals designed against SARS-CoV promise to also be effective against SARS-CoV-2. We investigate this sequence similarity by performing a BLASTp alignment of the two sequences. Interestingly, only 76% identity was observed (Figure 7) suggesting that the SARS-CoV-2 protein might have evolved to be sufficiently different from its SARS-CoV variant to render existing anti-virals ineffective. However, the SARS-CoV-2 variant is likely to share a similar mechanism of action where the recombinant SARS-CoV-2 spike protein downregulates ACE2 expression and thereby promotes lung injury, as seen in the SARS-CoV variant [19] .