Vital Role In Viral Replication
In an attempt to increase the diagnosis possibilities of COVID-19 patients, this assay was developed for the detection of specific antibodies against one of the 16 non-structural proteins, the main viral protease (Mpro or 3CLpro), which plays a critical role in viral replication.
The Mpro protease plays a vital role in processing the polyproteins that are translated from the viral RNA. Although this protein is not exposed in the viral particle, Mpro is elicited after viral infection. Like other b-coronaviruses, SARS-CoV-2 is a positive-sense RNA virus that expresses multiple proteins as a single polypeptide chain, and Mpro cleaves the polyprotein to release mature proteins for the virus. Inhibitors that can block viral replication are promising potential drug candidates that could be used to treat patients suffering from the COVID-19 infection.