Investigating host-virus interaction mechanism and phylogenetic analysis of viral proteins involved in the pathogenesis

Abstract

Since the emergence of yellow fever in the Americas and the devastating 1918 influenza pandemic, biologists and clinicians have been drawn to human infecting viruses to understand their mechanisms of infection better and develop effective therapeutics against them. However, the complex molecular and cellular processes that these viruses use to infect and multiply in human cells have been a source of great concern for the scientific community since the discovery of the first human infecting virus. Viral disease outbreaks, such as the recent COVID-19 pandemic caused by a novel coronavirus, have claimed millions of lives and caused significant economic damage worldwide. In this study, we investigated the mechanisms of host-virus interaction and the molecular machinery involved in the pathogenesis of some common human viruses. We also performed a phylogenetic analysis of viral proteins involved in host-virus interaction to understand the changes in the sequence organization of these proteins during evolution for various strains of viruses to gain insights into the viral origin’s evolutionary perspectives.