Overview of lethal human coronaviruses

Neuroinvasion by human respiratory coronaviruses.

Human coronaviruses (HCoV) cause common colds but can also infect neural cell cultures. To provide definitive experimental evidence for the neurotropism and neuroinvasion of HCoV and its possible association with multiple sclerosis (MS), we have performed an extensive search and characterization of HCoV RNA in a large panel of human brain autopsy samples. Very stringent reverse transcription-PC...

Human brucellosis: An overview

Lethal Developmental Defects: An Overview

About 3% of all conceptions are associated with major congenital malformations, many of them are lethal developmental defect and genetic in origin or teratogenic (adverse effects of the environment during gametogenesis or early embryogenesis). Genetics with or without adverse environment has role in virtually every developmental defect/malformation disorders in causation, predisposition, suscep...

Inhibitory effects of recombinant human cystatin C on human coronaviruses.

Cystatin C, a potent inhibitor of cysteine proteases such as papain and cathepsin B, was examined for its effect on human coronaviruses OC43 and 229e. Both viruses were greater than 99% inhibited by 0.1 mM inhibitor. Endpoint titrations showed that inhibiting activity paralleled that of leupeptin, a serine and cysteine protease inhibitor, and indicated that 1 to 2 microM inhibitor, slightly abo...

More and More Coronaviruses: Human Coronavirus HKU1

After human coronaviruses OC43, 229E and NL63, human coronavirus HKU1 (HCoV-HKU1) is the fourth human coronavirus discovered. HCoV-HKU1 is a group 2a coronavirus that is still not cultivable. The G + C contents of HCoV-HKU1 genomes are 32%, the lowest among all known coronaviruses with complete genome sequences available. Among all coronaviruses, HCoV-HKU1 shows the most extreme codon usage bia...