Open AccessAnalysis of the Spike Proteins Suggest Pangolin as an Intermediate Host of COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2)
Author(s) -
Sohail Raza,
Muhammad Tariq Navid,
Wajeeha Zahir,
Muhammad Nabeel Khan,
Muhammad Awais,
Tahir Yaqub,
Masood Rabbani,
Muhammad Imran Rashid,
Salina Saddick,
Muhammad Rasheed
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
international journal of agriculture and biology/international journal of agriculture and biology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.271
H-Index - 39
eISSN - 1814-9596
pISSN - 1560-8530
DOI - 10.17957/ijab/15.1711
Subject(s) - pangolin , biology , phylogenetic tree , population , transmission (telecommunications) , pandemic , coronavirus , host (biology) , evolutionary biology , multiple sequence alignment , genome , sequence alignment , phylogenetics , covid-19 , genetics , gene , infectious disease (medical specialty) , ecology , peptide sequence , disease , medicine , demography , pathology , sociology , electrical engineering , engineering
The novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) is a third member of its group that has introduced public health catastrophes around the globe. Since, its emergence in Wuhan, China by December 2019, SARS-CoV-2 infected millions of human population along with many casualties globally. The transmission potential of SARS-CoV-2 between humans has already been studied. Despite this transmission in human population, the primary origin of SARS-CoV-2 has been linked with bats by the help of an intermediate (secondary) host. This study was assumed to investigate the possible secondary or intermediate host to shuttle down the SARS-CoV-2 transmission and further to mitigate future pandemics. The antigenic surface/spike (S) protein was used for the structural and genomic analysis through currently available computer assisted technology. For the In-silico analysis, 43 sequences of S-protein of coronaviruses originated in various species were retrieved from nucleotide database of NCBI. These sequences were matched to find any similarities/differences by employing pairwise and multiple sequence alignment. The phylogenetic analysis was conducted to observe the relation among different species through MEGA software. Finally, comparative analysis for structures of S-protein (superimposition) was done with reference structure by using UCSF Chimera software. The results of this study expressed maximum match of S-protein sequences of human coronavirus with Bat and with Pangolin sequences respectively. The Phylogenetic analysis between Bat and Pangolin showed that SARS-CoV-2 transmitted from bats to humans possibly through the intermediate host of Pangolin. © 2021 Friends Science Publishers