Haunted with and hunting for viruses

Gao, George Fu; Wu, Ying

Tan and colleagues [22] specifically focused on the newly-emerged MERS-CoV. The virus was identified in 2012 in the Middle East with some exported cases to Europe. In 2013 the virus has been re-emerging and expanding its borders to more European countries. In the initial diagnosis, the pan-coronavirus real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) assay played a very important role for the identification of the causative agents. By using this method, scientists detected an expected-size PCR fragment for the corresponding conserved region of ORF1b of the replicase gene of a coronavirus. This is another example that molecular biology methods played for the discovery of new pathogens. Soon the receptor used by MERS-CoV to enter the host cells was identified [23] and the molecular basis of the receptor binding to the virus was also elucidated recently [8] .