Coronavirus website collates viral vitals. |
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A new online database of genetic information on severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) could help fight the killer disease, Canadian scientists hope.
The SARS website is part of ongoing efforts to understand and combat the pneumonia-like disease, which has killed more than 800 people. Although its spread has been curbed, research on potential vaccines and cures continues apace amid fears that SARS, like flu, may surface again in winter.
The free-access SARS Bioinformatics Suite was launched at the end of May. It now carries the genetic codes of 33 viruses. These include SARS strains isolated from different patients, plus related bird, cow, pig and human coronaviruses that can also cause respiratory infections.
The resource is regularly updated and provides customized software to help sift out useful features from the viruses' roughly 30,000 chemical letters. "We're trying to make the most useful site for the community," says Rachel Roper of the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, who coordinates the site with colleague Chris Upton.
Other researchers are collating SARS sequence data - but the team hopes that their tools to manipulate sequences will make the site a first stop for interested scientists.
One piece of software helps to align different coronavirus codes to highlight their shared letters. Such telltale motifs should, for instance, reveal how enzymes carve up one colossal molecule called the polyprotein into smaller, largely unidentified proteins.
"It's an incredibly good resource," enthuses biochemist Lawrence McIntosh of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. His team is using it to probe the structures of SARS proteins.
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Many groups are trying to produce SARS proteins in the lab to test drugs and vaccines. Microbiologist Francois Jean, also at the University of British Columbia, exploited the SARS site to spot the regions of the genome required to synthesize the SARS spike protein, which sticks to cells and may ultimately form part of a vaccine.
Roper's group hopes to identify the genes that are common to all coronaviruses and are essential for their survival. "We'll do that fairly soon," she predicts. The researchers recently compiled such a set of parts for the poxvirus family, which includes fatal smallpox, and say that the disarmed version of the poxvirus or coronavirus might be used as a vaccine.
Roper suspects that, like poxviruses, the genes towards the ends of SARS' single genetic string are those that determine how well it can infect cells. These could have enabled it to jump into humans or may have made SARS a killer rather than a cough.
Even if SARS stays out of sight this winter, researchers agree that understanding it is worthwhile in case another dangerous coronavirus emerges. "The database is important," says McIntosh. "We need to look at more than just the obvious areas."
