Exhaustive mutational analysis of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 ORF3a: An essential component in the pathogen's infectivity cycle.

ABSTRACT: Detailed knowledge of a protein's key residues may assist in understanding its function and designing inhibitors against it. Consequently, such knowledge of one of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)'s proteins is advantageous since the virus is the etiological agent behind one of the biggest health crises of recent times. To that end, we constructed an exhaustive library of bacteria differing from each other by the mutated version of the virus's ORF3a viroporin they harbor. Since the protein is harmful to bacterial growth due to its channel activity, genetic selection followed by deep sequencing could readily identify mutations that abolish the protein's function. Our results have yielded numerous mutations dispersed throughout the sequence that counteract ORF

SUBMITTER: Benazraf A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9795539 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature