Abstract:

COVID-19 caused by the highly pathogenic SARS-CoV-2 has caused the death of over 470 thousand people worldwide. High mutation potentials of RNA viruses require the determination of the most accurate structure to be targeted for treatment. In this study, comparative genomic and proteomic analyses of SARS-CoV-2 were performed using SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, and the mutation potential of the residues was analyzed using bioinformatics tools. SARS-CoV-2 was found to be 80.08% and 58.79% similar to SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, respectively, at the nucleotide level. G+C content were 38%, 40.8% and 41.2% for SARS-CoV-2, SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, respectively. 5ʹUTR G+C content was 44.6%, 43.5% and 44.7% for SARS-CoV-2, MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV, respectively. At the amino acid level, SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV showed 83.3% similarity, whereas SARS-CoV-2 and MERS-CoV showed 42.5% similarity. The E, M, N and S proteins of SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV were found to be 94%, 90.1%, 90.6% and 76.1% identical, respectively. For SARS-CoV-2, 14 residues with a high risk of mutation and their repeat numbers in the genome were identified. Data from this study reveal that non-functional conserved proteins such as ORF6 and ORF7b with low risk of mutation may be appropriate targets for the treatment because of their functional properties.