In cooperation with colleagues from other labs, researchers of the CAS Shanghai Institutes of Materia Medica (SIMM) and the CAS Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology (IBCB) have made progress in gene cloning, protein expression, structural analysis, and drug design of SARS virus. This was announced May 16 by Pei Gang, director of the CAS Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, a parent institution of the two institutes.
The scientists have fulfilled the task of expressing and preliminarily verifying three key proteins of SARS virus. One of them is being used for in vitro SARS drug screening. The achievement is hailed as another significant step in SARS research after the SARS virus isolation and its whole genome sequencing. The findings will be fully reported in the June 5 issue of ACTA PHARMACOLOGICA SINICA.
It has been discovered that the SARS virus is a novel coronavirus. The research into its protein structure and function, scientists say, is an important approach for understanding its infection mechanism, establishing molecular-level screening models and developing SARS drugs. The work on SARS protein expression will lay a solid foundation for further studies
It is discovered that six proteins (protein E, S, M, N, RNA polymerase and 3CL Proteinase) of SARS virus play an important role in its infection. Wang Yuan and her colleagues of IBCB have been successful in cloning the cDNA of the six proteins on the basis of collecting RNA of SARS virus.
Based on the work, two SIMM research groups headed respectively by Shen Xu and Jiang Hualiang have obtained samples of E protein, N protein and 3CL Proteinase. At present their findings have been used for in vitro screening for SARS drugs.
Together with researchers of the CAS Shanghai Information Center for Life Sciences, and Shanghai Center for Bio-information Technology, SIMM researchers have analyzed and predicted in detail the interaction network of human protein and that of SARS virus, made structural analysis on key proteins of SARS virus and constructed a 3D model. So far the researchers have set up three molecular-level screening models and conducted virtue screening of the three proteins on a super computer, leading to the location of several hundreds of anti-SARS drug candidates from hundreds of thousands of compounds.
