Abstract
Recently, Coronavirus has been given considerable attention from the biomedical
community based on the emergence and isolation of a deadly coronavirus infecting
human. To understand the behavior of the newly emerging MERS-CoV requires
knowledge at different levels (epidemiologic, antigenic, and pathogenic), and
this knowledge can be generated from the most related viruses. In this study, we
aimed to compare between 3 species of Coronavirus, namely Middle East
Respiratory Syndrome (MERS-CoV), Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS-CoV),
and NeoCoV regarding whole genomes and 6 similar proteins (E, M, N, S, ORF1a,
and ORF1ab) using different bioinformatics tools to provide a better
understanding of the relationship between the 3 viruses at the nucleotide and
amino acids levels. All sequences have been retrieved from National Center for
Biotechnology Information (NCBI). Regards to target genomes’ phylogenetic
analysis showed that MERS and SARS-CoVs were closer to each other compared with
NeoCoV, and the last has the longest relative time. We found that all
phylogenetic methods in addition to all parameters (physical and chemical
properties of amino acids such as the number of amino acid, molecular weight,
atomic composition, theoretical pI, and structural formula) indicated that
NeoCoV proteins were the most related to MERS-CoV one. All phylogenetic trees
(by both maximum-likelihood and neighbor-joining methods) indicated that NeoCoV
proteins have less evolutionary changes except for ORF1a by just
maximum-likelihood method. Our results indicated high similarity between viral
structural proteins which are responsible for viral infectivity; therefore, we
expect that NeoCoV sooner may appear in human-related infection.
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