Chemical Biology and Drug Design on Coronaviruses and Antiviral Therapeutics

23 March 2020
23 March 2020

The SARS Cov 2 (COVID-19) pandemic has catapulted coronavirus research to centre stage. All the CB & DD articles presented in this collection refer to the SARS and MERS viruses but are relevant to SARS Cov 2. The main protease of coronaviruses is recognised as a drug target for SARS Cov 2 and is highly conserved throughout coronavirus strains.

CB & DD and Wiley Publishing make these articles freely available online for the foreseeable future during the COVID-19 pandemic as a public service.

The articles by Bacha & Freire et al, and Jo & Kim et al highlight experimental approaches to inhibitors while that of Plewczynski & Rychewski et al, details an in silico approach. QSAR is applied as a route to identify antiviral compounds in the article by Qureshi & Kumar et al. A potential path to vaccine design is described by Pimental & Burkhard et al. utilising peptide display on nano-particles of the SARS spike protein. The spike protein has recently been shown to interact with ACE2 the identified primary receptor for SARS Cov 2-19 (Hoffmann et al). An article on the general theme of viral receptors is provided by Skibutz et al., the authors study the CEACAM family of antigens on human neutrophils. The CEACAM5 and MERS-CoV spike interaction can be disrupted with an antibody to CEACAM5. To date there is no report of SARS Cov 2 utilising the CEACAM antigens. Of more general interest is the article by Zhu and Chen detailing comparisons of cytoplasmic domains of diverse viruses including viruses of the coronavirus group.

The Editorial Board and Wiley hope that these papers will prove valuable in your efforts to better understand coronaviruses and their potential therapeutic targets.

-David Selwood

Editor-in-Chief

Table of Contents

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Characteristics of flavonoids as potent MERS-CoV 3C-like protease inhibitors

Characteristics of flavonoids as potent MERS-CoV 3C-like protease inhibitors

MERS-CoV 3CLpro was assayed with a flavonoid library and some chalcone derivatives represented promising inhibitory activity. The docking study confirmed the experimental measurement of the better efficacy of helichrysetin than cardamonin. This study showed the antiviral effect of flavonoids in the atomic level.

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AVCpred: an integrated web server for prediction and design of antiviral compounds

AVCpred: an integrated web server for prediction and design of antiviral compounds

AVCpred is a QSAR approach to predict the antiviral potential of chemical compounds using relationships connecting molecular descriptors and inhibition. Experimentally validated antiviral compounds against important human viruses from ChEMBL database were used to develop the prediction models. The web server with user friendly prediction/design options also has other tools for analysis.