Identification of a Novel Small Molecule Inhibitor Against SARS Coronavirus Helicase
Jin-Beom Cho, Jin‐Moo Lee, Hee‐Chul Ahn, Yong‐Joo Jeong · Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology · 2015
Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) occurred in Guangdong, China in 2002 and was rapidly transmitted all over the world.Although the SARS pandemic was controlled in a year through global efforts, SARS has been regarded as a serious concern owing to the unavailability of effective medicine or vaccine.In fact, SARS patients were treated with conventional antiviral drugs, such as ribavirin, type-I interferon, and so on, during the initial outbreak.However, it was hard to determine which treatment was beneficial to SARS patients [16].Some worsened the symptoms of patients.Therefore, it is necessary to develop effective inhibitors against SARS for possible outbreak in the future.SARS was caused by a novel coronavirus, SARS coronavirus (SCV), which is a single-stranded (ss) RNA positive-strand virus with a genome of about 29.7 kb [12,15].From the SCV genome, pp1a and pp1ab polyproteins are synthesized and smaller functional proteins are produced by proteinases [7,9].This proteolysis generates several non-structural proteins (nsPs), such as RNA polymerase and NTPase/ helicase, which are major components of the membranebound viral replicase complex [7,17].Generally, viral