Acknowledgments

Supplemental Information

References

Main Text

A novel coronavirus (CoV) named ‘‘۲۰۱۹ novel coronavirus’’ or ‘‘۲۰۱۹-nCoV’’ by the World Health Organization (WHO) is responsible for the recent pneumonia outbreak that started in early December, 2019 in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China (Huang et al., 2020; Zhou et al., 2020; Zhu et al., 2020). This outbreak is associated with a large seafood and animal market, and investigations are ongoing to determine the origins of the infection. To date, thousands of human infections have been confirmed in China along with many exported cases across the globe (China CDC, 2020).

Coronaviruses mainly cause respiratory and gastrointestinal tract infections and are genetically classified into four major genera: Alphacoronavirus, Betacoronavirus, Gammacoronavirus, and Deltacoronavirus (Li, 2016). The former two genera primarily infect mammals, whereas the latter two predominantly infect birds (Tang et al., 2015). Six kinds of human CoVs have been previously identified. These include HCoV-NL63 and HCoV229E, which belong to the Alphacoronavirus genus; and HCoV-OC43, HCoVHKU1, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV), and Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV), which belong to the Betacoronavirus genus (Tang et al., 2015). Coronaviruses did not attract worldwide attention until the 2003 SARS pandemic, followed by the 2012 MERS and, most recently, the 2019-nCoV outbreaks (China CDC, 2020; Song et al., 2019). SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV are considered highly pathogenic (Cui et al., 2019), and it is very likely that both SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV were transmitted from bats to palm civets (Guan et al., 2003) or dromedary camels (Drosten et al., 2014), and finally to humans (Cui et al., 2019).

The genome of coronaviruses, whose size ranges between approximately 26,000 and 32,000 bases, includes a variable number (from 6 to 11) of open reading frames (ORFs) (Song et al., 2019). The first ORF representing approximately 67% of the entire genome encodes 16 non-structural proteins (nsps), while the remaining ORFs encode accessory proteins and structural proteins (Cui et al., 2019). The four major structural proteins are the spike surface glycoprotein (S), small envelope protein (E), matrix protein (M), and nucleocapsid protein (N). The spike surface glycoprotein plays an essential role in binding to receptors on the host cell and determines host tropism (Li, 2016; Zhu et al., 2018). The spike proteins of SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV bind to different host receptors via different receptor-binding domains (RBDs). SARSCoV uses angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) as one of the main receptors (Ge et al., 2013) with CD209L as an alternative receptor (Jeffers et al., 2004), whereas MERS-CoV uses dipeptidyl peptidase 4 (DPP4, also known as CD26) as the primary receptor. Initial analysis suggested that 2019-nCoV has a close evolutionary association with the SARSlike bat coronaviruses (Zhou et al., 2020). Here, based on the first three determined genomes of the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV), namely Wuhan/ IVDC-HB-01/2019 (GISAID accession ID: EPI_ISL_402119) (HB01), Wuhan/IVDCHB-04/2019 (EPI_ISL_402120) (HB04), and Wuhan/IVDC-HB-05/2019 (EPI_ ISL_402121) (HB05), an in-depth genome annotation of this virus was performed with a comparison to related coronaviruses, including 1,008 human SARSCoV, 338 bat SARS-like CoV, and 3,131 human MERS-CoV, whose genomes were published before January 12, 2020 (release date: September 12, 2019) from Virus Pathogen Database and Analysis Resource (ViPR) (http://www.viprbrc. org/) and NCBI.