Mechanistic insights into Zika virus NS3 helicase inhibition by Epigallocatechin-3-gallate: Supplementary Files

Deepak Kumar; Nitin Sharma; Murali Aarthy; Sanjeev Singh; Rajanish Giri

Zika virus (ZIKV), a close relative of dengue virus (DENV), is primarily a mosquito-transmitted pathogen that has already affected millions of people in more than 40 countries throughout Americas, South Pacific and South Asia(1, 2). The real danger posed by ZIKV is neurological defects like microcephaly and Guillain-Barre syndrome in newborns as well as in adults respectively (3, 4) . Epidemiological studies have also reported sexual mode of ZIKV transmission is further raising the threat alarm worldwide (5) . As on 1st February 2016, the World Health Organization has called a global health emergency that demands the development of safe and effective therapeutics. In 2017, WHO has confirmed three cases of ZIKV in Ahmedabad District, Gujarat, State, India (http://www.who.int/). A recent ZIKV outbreak in 2018 has been observed in India where more than 200 zika cases were confirmed including pregnant women. There is an urgency to develop antivirals against ZIKV. In past months, several bioactive molecules have been assayed either against ZIKV proteins or targeting cellular proteins by employing different approaches like screening new compound libraries or using drug repurposing (6, 7) . Another essential aspect in drug discovery that could not be ignored is the use of natural products which are known to possess enormous structural and chemical variety over any other synthetic compound library (8) . Moreover, natural products deliver a crucial advantage of being pre-selected evolutionary with optimized chemical structures against biological targets (9) .