A Summary of Viral Targets and Recently Released PDB IDs of SARS-CoV-2

Drug discovery and development against coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is the utmost need and the most challenging task of the hour. Many research groups from different countries are working continuously in this direction, and till 8 March 2020, a total of 382 clinical trials have been registered on the WHO’s International Clinical Trials Registry Platform [1]. There is an urgent need to identify specific targets to design promising therapeutic agents against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus that causes COVID-19. Analysis of SARS-CoV-2 reveals seven major target proteins that can be considered for drug design against the virus. These include the spike, envelope, membrane, nucleocapsid, protease, hemagglutinin esterase and helicase [2, 3]. Beyond these, several Non Structural Proteins (NSPs) can also be evaluated as targets for drug development [4]. There are only a few Protein Data Bank (PDB) Ids available related to SARS-CoV-2 in the RCSB database. Table 1 summarizes recently released PDB Ids (from 5.2.2020 to 25.3.2020) for various SARS-CoV-2 targets [5].