Molecular Biology Of The Sars Coronavirus

SARS was the ?rst new plague of the twenty-?rst century. Within months, it spread worldwide from its “birthplace” in Guangdong Province, China, affecting over 8,000 people in 25 countries and territories across ?ve continents. SARS exposed the vulnerability of our modern globalised world to the spread of a new emerging infection. SARS (or a similar new emerging disease) could neither have spread so rapidly nor had such a great global impact even 50 years ago, and arguably, it was itself a product of our global inter-connectedness. Increasing af?uence and a demand for wild-game as exotic food led to the development of large trade of live animal and game animal markets where many species of wild and domestic animals were co-housed, providing the ideal opportunities for inter-species tra- mission of viruses and other microbes. Once such a virus jumped species and attacked humans, the increased human mobility allowed the virus the opportunity for rapid spread. An infected patient from Guangdong who stayed for one day at a hotel in Hong Kong led to the transmission of the disease to 16 other guests who travelled on to seed outbreaks of the disease in Toronto, Singapore, and Vietnam, as well as within Hong Kong itself. The virus exploited the practices used in modern intensive care of patients with severe respiratory disease and the weakness in infection control practices within our health care systems to cause outbreaks within hospitals, further amplifying the spread of the disease. Health-care itself has become a two-edged sword.

The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has affected almost every part of the globe with millions of cases and over a million deaths. The pandemic has had a significant global economic impact and addressing it systematically requires significant efforts from researchers, healthcare workers and governments. The COVID-19 Pandemic covers relevant aspects of this viral pandemic including information about the SARS-CoV-2 pathogen (morphology, genome, proteins, structural protein genes, replication), global epidemiology, transmission, risk factors, clinical manifestation, management, host immune response, pathogenesis, diagnosis and therapeutic agents (antivirals, natural compounds and vaccines). Readers will find basic and advanced knowledge about the disease organized into simple and easy-to-read chapters about the disease, making this book a handy and comprehensive reference for general readers, academics and biology students, alike.

In this timely book, internationally renowned experts review literally every aspect of cutting edge coronavirus research, providing the first coherent picture of this molecular and cellular biology since the outbreak of SARS in 2003. The book is divided into two sections. Part I focuses on the molecular biology of the virus itself and includes topics such as coronavirus binding and entry, replicase gene function, cis-acting RNA elements, coronavirus discontinuous transcription, reverse genetics, genome packaging, and molecular evolution. In Part II of the book, the focus is on molecular and cellular pathogenesis and infection control. This section includes reviews of the three prototype viruses, namely avian infectious bronchitis virus, feline coronavirus, and mouse hepatitis virus. Other topics include SARS-CoV virus pathogenesis, SARS-CoV interaction with the host INF and antiviral cytokines, the newly recognized bat coronaviruses and human coronavirus NL63, and strategies for coronavirus vaccine development and the development of novel antiviral coronavirus agents.

In 2003, the word "coronavirus" spread across the globe, somewhat further than the virus that sparked the panic. In this book, expert researchers examine these devastating viruses through 23 state-of-the-art, widely applicable protocols with minute detail. Comprehensive and cutting-edge, the book serves as an ideal guide for all virologists and especially for those working with coronaviruses. Written by international experts, this book is relevant to a wide array of professions.

Offering a thorough, accessible overview of the basic science and clinical data regarding the virus that causes COVID-19, Molecular Biology of SARS-CoV-2 is an excellent resource for researchers, clinical scientists, physicians, and students. This volume offers in-depth, extended content that originated with Drs. Roberto Patarca’s and William A. Haseltine’s chapter in The COVID-19 Textbook, edited by Dr. Haseltine and Dr. Patarca. The greatly expanded material in this text provides a much-needed primer in this complex area.

The present volume contains the Proceedings of an EMBO Workshop organized in June 1983 by the Institute of Virology, Veterinary Faculty, State University of Utrecht, The Netherlands. Some 70 scientists from 11 countries followed the invitation to present and discuss their recent data on the structure, replication, genetics and pathogenesis of coronaviruses. It was the second international meeting on these viruses; the Workshop, which was held in Zeist near Utrecht followed the example of the Wuerzburg symposium of October 1980. At that time it became clear that coronaviruses are unique in many respects. Once a group of viruses that were defined merely on the basis of their characteristic peplomer morphology, Coronaviridae family members are known today - to be constructed from essentially three polypeptides - to use a "nested set" of 5-6 subgenomic mRNAs in the expression of their large, positive and single stranded RNA genome, - to generate these subgenomic RNAs through specific fusion of non contiguous sequences, - to mature by budding from intracellular membranes, - to cause persistent infection with neurological involvement and sometimes immunopathological conditons. These and many other findings have been established only very recently. The articles collected in this book reveal and/or further detail these findings. Since these Proceedings contain the combined scientific presentations of representatives from virtually all laboratories engaged in the field, they provide a fairly comprehensive review of the state of the art in corona virology.

Coronaviruses represent a major group of viruses of both molecular biological interest and clinical significance in animals and humans. During the past two decades, coronavirus research has been an expanding field and, since 1980, an international symposium was held every 3 years. We organized the yth symposium for providing an opportunity to assess important progresses made since the last symposium in Cambridge (U. K. ) and to suggest areas for future investigations. The symposium, held in September 1992, in Chantilly, France, was attended by 120 participants representing the majOlity of the laboratories engaged in the field. The present volume collects 75 papers which were presented during the yth symposium, thus providing a comprehensive view of the state of the art ofCoronavirology. The book is divided into 7 chapters. The first chapters gather reports dealing with genome organization, gene expression and structure-function relationships of the viral polypeptides. New sequence data about as yet poorly studied coronaviruses - canine coronavirus CCY and porcine epidemic diarrhoea virus PEDY - are presented. Increasing efforts appear to be devoted to the characterization of products of unknown function, encoded by various open reading frames present in the coronavirus genomes or delived from the processing of the large polymerase polyprotein. Due to the extreme size of their genome, the genetic engineering ofcoronavi\'uses through the production of full length cDNA clones is presently viewed as an unachievahle task.

The novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) has caused a serious global pandemic in just eight months. Nearly every country and territory in the world has been affected by the virus. The virulence and infection rate of the virus are profound, and has required extreme social distancing measures across the globe in order to prevent overwhelming the healthcare services and hospitals. COVID-19 appears to have the greatest effects on elderly individuals and those who have co-morbid diseases, such as heart disease, asthma, and diabetes. As the peak begins to slow in many countries, the death rates remain high amidst justified fears of a second wave. A rapid worldwide mobilization has begun to identify effective treatments and develop vaccines. This new volume will increase readers’ understanding of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic through a series of chapters that address these concerns. Leading experts will discuss the effects of the virus in cases of co-morbidities, new treatment approaches, mental health aspects of the pandemic, and convey the results of survey studies. The book will be an excellent resource for researchers studying virology, metabolic diseases, respiratory disorders, and clinical scientists, physicians, drug companies, and healthcare services and workers.