tetano
Editor, Senior Moderator
J Proteome Res
. 2020 Aug 13.
doi: 10.1021/acs.jproteome.0c00460. Online ahead of print.
Shell disorder analysis suggests that pangolins offered a window for a silent spread of an attenuated SARS-CoV-2 precursor among humans
Gerard Kian-Meng Goh, A Keith Dunker, James A Foster, Vladimir N Uversky
Abstract
A model to predict the relative levels of respiratory and fecal-oral transmission potentials of coronaviruses (CoVs) by measuring the percentage of protein intrinsic disorder (PID) of the M (Membrane) and N (Nucleoprotein) proteins in their outer and inner shells, respectively, was built before the MERS-CoV outbreak. With MPID = 8.6% and NPID = 50.2%, the 2003 SARS-CoV falls into group B, which consists of CoVs with intermediate levels of both fecal-oral and respiratory transmission potentials. Further validation of the model came with MERS-CoV (MPID = 9%, NPID = 44%) and SARS-CoV-2 (MPID = 5.5%, NPID = 48%) falling into the groups C and B, respectively. Group C contains CoVs with higher fecal-oral but lower respiratory transmission potentials. Unlike SARS-CoV, SARS-CoV-2 with MPID = 5.5% has one of the hardest outer shells among CoVs. . Because the hard shell is able to resist the anti-microbial enzymes in body fluids, the infected person is able to shed large quantities of viral particles via saliva and mucus, which could account for the higher contagiousness of SARS-COV-2 . Further searches have found that high rigidity of outer shell is characteristic for the CoVs of burrowing animals, such as rabbits (MPID = 5.6%) and pangolins (MPID = 5-6%), which are in contact with the buried feces. A closer inspection of pangolin-CoVs from 2017-19 reveals that pangolins provided a unique window of opportunity for the entry of an attenuated SARS-CoV-2 precursor into the human population in 2017 or earlier, with the subsequent slow and silent spread as a mild cold that followed by its mutations into the current more virulent form. Evidence of this lies in both the genetic proximity of the pangolin-CoVs to SARS-CoV-2(~90%) and differences in N disorder. A 2017 pangolin-CoV strain shows evidence of higher levels of attenuation and higher fecal-oral transmission associated with lower human infectivity via having lower NPID (44.8%). Our shell disorder model predicts this to be a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine strain as lower inner shell disorder is associated with the lesser virulence in a variety of viruses.
. 2020 Aug 13.
doi: 10.1021/acs.jproteome.0c00460. Online ahead of print.
Shell disorder analysis suggests that pangolins offered a window for a silent spread of an attenuated SARS-CoV-2 precursor among humans
Gerard Kian-Meng Goh, A Keith Dunker, James A Foster, Vladimir N Uversky
- PMID: 32790362
- DOI: 10.1021/acs.jproteome.0c00460
Abstract
A model to predict the relative levels of respiratory and fecal-oral transmission potentials of coronaviruses (CoVs) by measuring the percentage of protein intrinsic disorder (PID) of the M (Membrane) and N (Nucleoprotein) proteins in their outer and inner shells, respectively, was built before the MERS-CoV outbreak. With MPID = 8.6% and NPID = 50.2%, the 2003 SARS-CoV falls into group B, which consists of CoVs with intermediate levels of both fecal-oral and respiratory transmission potentials. Further validation of the model came with MERS-CoV (MPID = 9%, NPID = 44%) and SARS-CoV-2 (MPID = 5.5%, NPID = 48%) falling into the groups C and B, respectively. Group C contains CoVs with higher fecal-oral but lower respiratory transmission potentials. Unlike SARS-CoV, SARS-CoV-2 with MPID = 5.5% has one of the hardest outer shells among CoVs. . Because the hard shell is able to resist the anti-microbial enzymes in body fluids, the infected person is able to shed large quantities of viral particles via saliva and mucus, which could account for the higher contagiousness of SARS-COV-2 . Further searches have found that high rigidity of outer shell is characteristic for the CoVs of burrowing animals, such as rabbits (MPID = 5.6%) and pangolins (MPID = 5-6%), which are in contact with the buried feces. A closer inspection of pangolin-CoVs from 2017-19 reveals that pangolins provided a unique window of opportunity for the entry of an attenuated SARS-CoV-2 precursor into the human population in 2017 or earlier, with the subsequent slow and silent spread as a mild cold that followed by its mutations into the current more virulent form. Evidence of this lies in both the genetic proximity of the pangolin-CoVs to SARS-CoV-2(~90%) and differences in N disorder. A 2017 pangolin-CoV strain shows evidence of higher levels of attenuation and higher fecal-oral transmission associated with lower human infectivity via having lower NPID (44.8%). Our shell disorder model predicts this to be a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine strain as lower inner shell disorder is associated with the lesser virulence in a variety of viruses.