New Delhi: In a significant discovery, Japanese researchers have found that SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind COVID-19, carries an enzyme that can counteract a cell’s innate defence mechanism against viruses, shedding new light on how the virus evades the immune response.
The researchers from Kobe University said this can explain why COVID-19 is more infectious than the previous SARS and MERS-causing viruses.
The team focused their study on the role of a molecular tag called “ISG15” in the COVID-19 virus. This tag prevents nucleocapsid proteins from attaching to each other, a key process enabling viruses to assemble.
In addition, the “enzyme can remove the tags from its nucleocapsid, recovering its ability to assemble new viruses and thus overcoming the innate immune response,” explained virologist Shoji Ikuo from the varsity in a paper in the Journal of Virology.
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While SARS and MERS viruses also carry an enzyme that can remove the ISG15 tag, Shoji’s team found that their versions are less efficient.
“The results suggest that the novel coronavirus is simply better at evading this aspect of the innate immune system’s defence mechanism, which explains why it is so infectious,” Shoji said.
The innate immune system, our body’s first line of defense against pathogens, plays a crucial role in limiting viral entry, replication, and assembly, as well as in detecting and removing infected cells.
Unlike SARS and MERS viruses, COVID rapidly spread to almost all continents, including the sparsely inhabited Antarctica. The Covid virus continues to mutate and infect with newer variants. However, the severity has decreased with mass vaccinations and herd immunity.
These new insights hold promise for the development of more effective drugs against COVID-19 and potentially similar future diseases, offering a ray of hope in the fight against the pandemic.
“We may be able to develop new antiviral drugs if we can inhibit the function of the viral enzyme that removes the ISG15 tag. Future therapeutic strategies may also include antiviral agents that directly target the nucleocapsid protein or a combination of these two approaches,” the researchers said.
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–IANS
