Collection

Coronavirus collection

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Closed
As a service to the community, this first topical collection from Archives of Virology brings together seven published articles from 2020 that are relevant to SARS-CoV-2. Two of the articles reaffirm that variation in the sequences of both bovine and avian coronaviruses occur regularly and can affect pathogenicity (Abi, 2020, Ismail, 2020); one of the variations recorded in a bovine coroanvirus is the insertion of 12 nucleotides in the hemagglutinin-esterase gene near the receptor binding domain (Abi et al, 2020). A third manuscript showed that novel coronaviruses can appear in swine through the process of recombination (Park et al, 2020). Both insertion mutagenesis and recombination were and still are important processes in the evolution of SARS-CoV-2. A model for the mechanism of recombination in coronaviruses involving the stuttering of the polymerase based on palindromic sequences (Gallaher, 2020) attracted a great deal of attention. Finally, already in April 2020, Archives of Virology published a review on the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 (Gomes da Costa et al, 2020), discussed in the context of the emergence of SARS and MERS coronaviruses. This detailed review has been downloaded almost 10,000 times and already has over 60 citiations. The article provides an excellent introduction to the field and provides the background to understanding these pathogens that have plagued the world in this still relatively young century.

Articles (17 in this collection)