Identification of quercetin from fruits to immediately fight Zika

Amrita Roy; Liangzhong Lim; Jianxing Song

The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the author/funder. . https://doi.org/10.1101/074559 doi: bioRxiv preprint drugs (11) (12) (13) (14) (15) (16) (17) (18) . In particular, the unique concern on the vaccine treatment to Zika and Dengue strongly emphasizes the irreplaceable role of the Zika protease as a target for antiviral drug discovery/design. As facilitated by our previous studies on Dengue NS2B-NS3pro (12), we started to work on Zika NS2B-NS3pro immediately after the outbreak of Zika and now successfully obtained several active forms of recombinant Zika NS2B-NS3pro. Furthermore, we attempted to discover its inhibitors from eatable plants and traditional herbal medicines to fight Zika with no delay. Here we release the result that quercetin, a flavonoid existing in many fruits and vegetables, inhibits Zika NS2B-NS3pro, and subsequently determined its inhibitory activity. For the first time, our study reveals that many fruits, vegetables, leaves and grains, as well as herbals containing quercetin are expected to have anti-Zika activity, and therefor can join in to combat Zika immediately.