What are coronaviruses? How are they structured and what is being done to be more prepared next time another one emerges? This and much more in this new episode of The Viral Talk.

Join your usual host Federico and an old friend of the show Bobbie-Anne Turner from the University of Liverpool to hear about the dreaded coronaviruses!

Key points:

• The scientific community has known about coronaviruses for a long time. The first coronavirus ever discovered was a poultry coronavirus named Infectious bronchitis virus and was discovered in the 1940s.

• The first human coronaviruses were discovered together in the 60s by the common cold unit in the UK, and were human coronaviruses OC43 and 229E;

• Coronaviruses are very diverse but have roughly the same genome structure. They all possess a set of 14 non-structural genes necessary to make the proteins that allow the virus to make more copies of itself. And they all possess four structural proteins, which make the building blocks of the viral particle (or virion).
• These four proteins, called Spike, Envelope, Membrane and Nucleocapsid all have important functions during infection. Spike is found on the surface of the virus and is the protein that allows it to infect cells. Envelope is thought to have a general role in coordinating the assembly process of the virus inside the cell. The Membrane protein is the physical outer layer of the viral particle, which contains its genome and on which the Spike protein is found, and the Nucleocapsid wraps around the newly made copies of viral genome and packages it inside the virus.
• Different viruses can have a variable number of 'accessory' genes, which help the virus during infection by fighting the host immune response or facilitating spread between cells.

• Coronaviruses are very diverse, there are four different groups called Alpha-, Beta-, Delta- and Gamma-coronaviruses. Alpha and Beta coronaviruses usually infect mammals, Delta and Gamma coronaviruses more often than not infect birds, but this is not an absolute.
• Some coronaviruses are specialists, meaning that they only infect a specific type of host, while others, like SARS-CoV-2, can be quite generalists, and infect a series of animals.
• This characteristic is important for emergence and re-emergence, and it tells us that it is important to be constantly surrounding the environment and both wild animals and human-adjacent animals. The biggest example of this is deer in America and now in Europe, as it seems that SARS-CoV-2 has taken a home in white-tailed deer that might act as a wild reservoir for the virus.
• Apart from the pandemic, the scientific community is very interested in coronaviruses because in the last 20 years there have been three different instances of emergence of highly pathogenic coronaviruses, with SARS-CoV in 2003, MERS-CoV in 2012 and SARS-CoV-2 in 2019.
• There is a lot going on in the scientific community to be prepared for when the next one comes forward. Environmental surveillance is going strong. There are strong efforts to develop a pancoronavirus vaccine to make sure we’d be protected against any coronavirus. There are many international consortia, such as the UK-ICN, the SARS-CoV-2 G2P consortia, and many more, that foster international collaboration, inform governments and integrate lab and social sciences to better tackle the practical problems emerging from pandemics and governance.

For the sciency people

Intro to Coronaviruses: 10.1038/220650b0

History of coronaviruses: 10.33493/scivis.20.01.04

Coronavirus diversity: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2022.926677

What are the human coronaviruses: 10.1038/220650b0 

Relevant links

What’s the UK-ICN? https://uk-icn.co.uk/

What’s the G2P consortium? https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=MR%2FW005611%2F1

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