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A new interesting article has been published in Comput Biol Med. 2020 Apr; 119:103670. doi: 10.1016/j.compbiomed.2020.103670. Epub 2020 Feb 26. and titled:

Computers and viral diseases. Preliminary bioinformatics studies on the design of a synthetic vaccine and a preventative peptidomimetic antagonist …

Authors of this article are:

Robson B.

A summary of the article is shown below:

This paper concerns study of the genome of the Wuhan Seafood Market isolate believed to represent the causative agent of the disease COVID-19. This is to find a short section or sections of viral protein sequence suitable for preliminary design proposal for a peptide synthetic vaccine and a peptidomimetic therapeutic, and to explore some design possibilities. The project was originally directed towards a use case for the Q-UEL language and its implementation in a knowledge management and automated inference system for medicine called the BioIngine, but focus here remains mostly on the virus itself. However, using Q-UEL systems to access relevant and emerging literature, and to interact with standard publically available bioinformatics tools on the Internet, did help quickly identify sequences of amino acids that are well conserved across many coronaviruses including 2019-nCoV. KRSFIEDLLFNKV was found to be particularly well conserved in this study and corresponds to the region around one of the known cleavage sites of the SARS virus that are believed to be required for virus activation for cell entry. This sequence motif and surrounding variations formed the basis for proposing a specific synthetic vaccine epitope and peptidomimetic agent. The work can, nonetheless, be described in traditional bioinformatics terms, and readily reproduced by others, albeit with the caveat that new data and research into 2019-nCoV is emerging and evolving at an explosive pace. Preliminary studies using molecular modeling and docking, and in that context the potential value of certain known herbal extracts, are also described.Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Check out the article’s website on Pubmed for more information:

[link-preview url=https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32209231 forceshot=true]

This article is a good source of information and a good way to become familiar with topics such as: 2019-nCoV coronavirus; Automatic browser; Bioinformatics; Peptidomimetic; Q-UEL language; Retroinverso; Synthetic vaccine; Wuhan seafood market coronavirus.

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