Obviously, SARS-CoV-2 is divergent from SARS-CoV. These genome sequences share 79.5% sequence identity to SARS-CoV. Early in the pneumonia epidemic in Wuhan, scientists obtained the complete genome sequences from five patients infected with SARS-CoV-2. It belongs to the betacoronavirus 2B lineage ( Lai etР’В al., 2020). The Origin and Evolution of SARS-CoV-2Р”В«ioinformatic analyses showed that SARS-CoV-2 had characteristics typical of coronavirus family. After the emergence of SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, SARS-CoV-2 is the third zoonotic human coronavirus of the century ( Gralinski and Menachery, 2020). The total cumulative number of confirmed cases have far exceeded the number during SARS period ( Wang and Jin, 2020). Globally, the United States, India, and Brazil are the three countries with the largest cumulative number of confirmed cases in the world ( ). Data as received by WHO from national authorities by October 11, 2020, there were more than 37 million confirmed cases with COVID-19 and 1 million deaths. et al., 2020) and the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) named the virus as SARS-CoV-2 ( Hu B. On February 11, 2020, the WHO officially named the current outbreak of coronavirus disease as Coronavirus Disease-2019 (COVID-19) ( Sun P. On January 30, 2020, WHO declared that the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) epidemic is a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC). In December 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) was informed about an outbreak of pneumonia in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, and the etiology was not identified. General Information of SARS-CoV-2 Current Situation of SARS-CoV-2 Epidemic We wish the information provided by this review may be helpful to the global battle against SARS-CoV-2 infection. And particularly, we introduced the protein structures of SARS-CoV-2 and structure-based therapeutics development including antibodies, antiviral compounds, and vaccines, and indicated the limitations and perspectives of SARS-CoV-2 research.

We further discussed the biology of SARS-CoV-2, including the origin, evolution, and receptor recognition mechanism of SARS-CoV-2. In this review, we briefly summarized the current advances in SARS-CoV-2 research, including the epidemic situation and epidemiological characteristics of the caused disease COVID-19.

Comprehensive understandings on the life logic of SARS-CoV-2 and the interaction of the virus with hosts are fundamentally important in the fight against SARS-CoV-2. Effective therapeutic and preventive approaches including drugs and vaccines are still unavailable although they are in development. The pandemic of the novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has been posing great threats to the world in many aspects. Key Laboratory of Cellular Physiology at Shanxi Medical University, Ministry of Education, Key Laboratory of Cellular Physiology of Shanxi Province, and the Department of Physiology, Shanxi Medical University, Taiyuan, China.Mei-Yue Wang РІР‚В , Rong Zhao РІР‚В , Li-Juan Gao, Xue-Fei Gao, De-Ping Wang * and Ji-Min Cao *

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