Seminar of the Laboratory 'Biology of the SARS-CoV-2 virus'

At the meeting of the seminar, a student of the 3rd year of study of the bachelor's program 'Cellular and Molecular Biotechnology' Fedor Polyakov reviewed the article Kim D et al. A high-resolution temporal atlas of the SARS-CoV-2 translatome and transcriptome. Nat Commun. 2021 Aug 25;12(1):5120 (doi: 10.1038/s41467-021-25361-5).

COVID-19 is caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which infected >200 million people resulting in >4 million deaths. However, temporal landscape of the SARS-CoV-2 translatome and its impact on the human genome remain unexplored. Here, we report a high-resolution atlas of the translatome and transcriptome of SARS-CoV-2 for various time points after infecting human cells. Intriguingly, substantial amount of SARS-CoV-2 translation initiates at a novel translation initiation site (TIS) located in the leader sequence, termed TIS-L. Since TIS-L is included in all the genomic and subgenomic RNAs, the SARS-CoV-2 translatome may be regulated by a sophisticated interplay between TIS-L and downstream TISs. TIS-L functions as a strong translation enhancer for ORF S, and as translation suppressors for most of the other ORFs. Our global temporal atlas provides compelling insight into unique regulation of the SARS-CoV-2 translatome and helps comprehensively evaluate its impact on the human genome.