RNA interference as a promising treatment against SARS-CoV-2
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COMMENTARY
RNA interference as a promising treatment against SARS-CoV-2 Ahmed Donia 1
&
Habib Bokhari 1
Received: 25 August 2020 / Revised: 25 August 2020 / Accepted: 28 August 2020 # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract Until now, there is no current vaccine or treatment against SARS-CoV-2. There are previous successful RNAi studies performed on SARS-CoV. Therefore, similar line of investigation against SARS-CoV-2 could be successful. Keywords SARS-CoV . SARS-CoV-2 . RNAi . Leader sequence
RNA interference (RNAi) is a mechanism through which small interfering RNA (siRNA) triggers post-transcriptional gene silencing. RNAi has shown promising results in the protection from viral invasion, since it inhibits the expression of viral antigens and controls the replication and transcription of the viral genome (Wu and Chan 2006). Recent comparative genomic analyses of SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV have concluded that the genomic sequences of SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 have extremely high homology at the nucleotide level. Most of SARS-CoV-2 proteins are extremely high homologous (95–100%) to the proteins of SARS-CoV virus, showing the evolutionary similarity between SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 (Xu et al. 2020). At the whole-genome level, the sequences of SARS-CoV-2 share approximately 79% sequence identity to SARS-CoV (Zhou et al. 2020). Previous studies reported that RNAi has shown promising results against SARS-CoV appeared in 2003 (He et al. 2003; Wang et al. 2004; Wu et al. 2005; Li et al. 2005a; Li et al. 2005b; Enjuanes et al. 2001). Since SARS-CoV-2 shares approximately 79% identity to SARS-CoV, we can expect promising results if researchers explore the similar line of investigation against SARS-CoV-2. Therefore, RNAi could be a promising strategy in SARS-CoV-2 therapy.
* Ahmed Donia [email protected] * Habib Bokhari [email protected] 1
Biosciences Department, Faculty of Science, COMSATS University Islamabad, Islamabad, Pakistan
RNAi (through siRNAs) was successful in targeting the replicase 1A region of SARS-CoV, inhibiting SARS-CoV infection in vitro (He et al. 2003). Previous study also reported the production of plasmid-mediated small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) to target the viral RNA polymerase, which successfully inhibited the cytopathic effects of SARS-CoV on Vero cells (Wang et al. 2004). These plasmid-mediated small interfering RNAs also prevented viral replication as seen by titer assays and by calculation of viral RNA and protein levels. In a previous study, scientists targeted four regions in the SARS-CoV genome: the leader sequence, transcriptionregulating sequence (TRS), 3′-UTR, and the S protein– coding sequence. They found that S gene specific targeted siRNAs greatly reduced levels of amount of RNA transcripts and viral antigens; although 3′-UTR-oriented siRNAs were not as effective, the two other siRNAs targeting the leader sequence and TRS had no effect (Wu et al. 2005). Pioneering study found that siRNAs showed prominent prophylactic and therapeutic activity against SARS-CoV in Rhesus
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