In silico approach to understand the epigenetic mechanism of SARS-CoV-2 and its impact on the environment

Virusdisease. 2021 Jun;32(2):286-297. doi: 10.1007/s13337-021-00655-w. Epub 2021 Apr 5.

Abstract

The novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) has led to the apex pandemic in 2020, responsible for the recent sequential spread. The 2019-nCoV has been discerned to be a Beta-BAT-SARS-CoV-2 lineage. The gene ontology (GO) identifies the virus to be localized in the Golgi apparatus with a vital molecular function of binding and viral progression. The source organism is almost all bats, further suggesting that the host of this virus is bat rather than civets or snakes, and has motifs which are perfect matches to various human and mouse genomic motifs such as-zinc fingers, DNA-binding domains, and basic helix-loop-helix factors. It has basic clusters of orthologs (COGs)-Superfamily I DNA and RNA helicases and helicase subunits and Predicted phosphatase homologous to the C-terminal domain of histone macroH2A1 respectively hinting at the epigenetic alterations which could be the reason behind the "novelty" the virus. Our study discerns that the SARS-CoV-2 endorses the epigenetic mechanism essential for its replication and reproduction in the host organism. Furthermore, we identified six non-toxic disinfectants with higher pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics properties, namely Quaternary Ammonium, Octanoic acid, Citric acid, Phenolics, 1,2-Hexanediol, and Thymol, that bind to lyases, nuclear receptors, fatty acids binding family, enzymes, and family AG protein-coupled receptors indicating that they target the nucleocapsid (N) protein, envelope (E) protein, membranous proteins of the novel coronavirus, thus, killing it from the surfaces when sprayed and are not harmful to the biological environment.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s13337-021-00655-w.

Keywords: 2019-nCoV; Beta-BAT-SARS-CoV-2; Coronaviruses; Disinfectants; Epigenetics; Toxicology analysis.