Giant Virus-Eukaryote Interactions as Ecological and Evolutionary Driving Forces

Giant DNA viruses of eukaryotes are notable for their extraordinary genome size and coding capacity. Once thought to be oddities in the virus world, these elusive microbes have turned out to be widely occurring in marine, freshwater, and terrestrial ecosystems and are commonly associated with diverse hosts, in particular microbial eukaryotes.

The New Era of Education amidst COVID-19 Lockdown

Novel Corona Virus Disease (COVID-19) pandemic has immensely affected each and every aspect of human life. Due to spreading of the virus world-wide and that too at an alarming rate, education system has been badly hit since the arrival of Corona virus. It has made the schools and colleges to shut down and has compelled them to adopt the online mode of education. According to a UNESCO report, more than 157 crore students across 191 countries had been severely affected by the closure of educational institutions throughout the globe due to COVID-19. Efforts are being taken to identify and investigate the challenges that presently our higher education system is facing due to COVID-19 disruption. There are opportunities that need to be explored for the upcoming global teaching and learning after COVID-19. There had been a lot of anxiety and uncertainty regarding opening of schools and colleges as previously there was no vaccine for the corona virus. This paper attempts to study how different categories viz. Administration, Students and Teachers in the educational sector have been affected by the lockdown keeping in view the cancellation of exams, study plan, examination, career and classes. For the analysis, primary data has been collected through a questionnaire in which a total of 116 number of responses have been recorded. Keywords: Schools, Colleges, Institutions, Universities, Online education, Education, COVID-19, Lockdown.

Promiscuous Biological Features of Newly Emerged SARS-CoV-2 Facilitate its Unrestrained Outbreak: An Update

: The unrelenting protraction of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), inflicted by Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), is tending to craft havoc all over the world for the past ten months. Keeping into consideration looming repercussions due to this deadly virus world over, there is an impending necessity to comprehend this newfangled contagion. To develop an effective eradication measure and preventive strategy, knowledge about the virus structure, life cycle, and metabolism is imperative. Better insight into the virus life cycle helps us to identify and design drugs that can hit crucial targets of this dreadful virus. The close genetic similarity between SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV, which triggeredan outbreak in the year 2003, could be of great strategic importance in designing effective drug formulations. This will also help in leveraging immunological measures and development of leveraging immunological measures to develop an effective vaccine against SARS-CoV-2. This eventually will help us to progress our strategies to contain the virus. Not on the positive side, there is some misinformation going all around the world despite the strict regulations from the WHO and other government agencies to inform the citizens to abstain from the rumour-mongering to contain the COVID-19. Further, evidence needs to be gathered on vaccine strategies to cure the patients suffering from COVID-19. This information will also help us in designing both drug inhibitors as well as prophylactic measures against SARS-CoV-2.

VIPERdb v3.0: a structure-based data analytics platform for viral capsids

VIrus Particle ExploreR data base (VIPERdb) (http://viperdb.scripps.edu) is a curated repository of virus capsid structures and a database of structure-derived data along with various virus specific information. VIPERdb has been continuously improved for over 20 years and contains a number of virus structure analysis tools. The release of VIPERdb v3.0 contains new structure-based data analytics tools like Multiple Structure-based and Sequence Alignment (MSSA) to identify hot-spot residues within a selected group of structures and an anomaly detection application to analyze and curate the structure-derived data within individual virus families. At the time of this writing, there are 931 virus structures from 62 different virus families in the database. Significantly, the new release also contains a standalone database called ‘Virus World database’ (VWdb) that comprises all the characterized viruses (∼181 000) known to date, gathered from ICTVdb and NCBI, and their capsid protein sequences, organized according to their virus taxonomy with links to known structures in VIPERdb and PDB. Moreover, the new release of VIPERdb includes a service-oriented data engine to handle all the data access requests and provides an interface for futuristic data analytics using machine leaning applications.

Coronaviruses in animals and humans, COVID-19 pandemic and one health approach

Coronaviruses can infect several animal species including cattle, pigs, dogs, and cats resulting in diseases related to respiratory and gastrointestinal systems. In humans, coronaviruses generally cause mild to moderate illnesses of the respiratory tract. Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-CoV), which emerged during 2002/03 and 2012/13 respectively, caused severe respiratory illnesses in humans. In December 2019, a novel respiratory coronavirus, SARS coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) emerged from Wuhan, China and caused coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Owing to the rapid spread of this virus, World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 outbreak as a global pandemic, which claimed over 300,000 lives by 16th May 2020. Data available so far indicate that COVID-19-associated severe illnesses, hospitalizations and deaths are more common in elderly above 65 years of age; in men; and in individuals with underlying health conditions such as cardiovascular disease, hypertension and diabetes. SARS-CoV-2 is considered to be emerged from bats and likely involved certain, yet to be identified, intermediate animal host. Prevention and control of ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and possible disease outbreaks in the future by other emerging and reemerging pathogens, requires efficient implementation of one health strategy that utilizes the expertise of human, animal and environmental health sectors.

ATTITUDES TOWARD VULNERABLE POPULATIONS IN THE TIME OF COVID-19: CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF GAZETA.PL ONLINE COMMENT SECTIONS

According to the World Health Organization, older people and people with preexisting medical conditions appear to be more vulnerable to becoming severely ill with the COVID-19 virus (World Health Organization 2020). A few journalists (Arielle 2020, Held 2020) have pointed out that in light of the current COVID-19 crisis, vulnerable populations such as elderly people, people with disabilities, and people with preexisting medical conditions have been talked about as if they were “disposable” or “expendable”. Therefore, this study will attempt to examine how vulnerable populations are perceived by Polish public in the context of the global COVID-19 pandemy. In order to achieve that, I will analyze, by the means of critical discourse analysis, comment sections below online articles and editorials covering the topic of the COVID-19 virus on the popular Polish portal Gazeta.pl. In order to narrow down the scope of this study I will only focus on those articles and comments that were published in the week following March 4th 2020 when the first COVID-19 case in Poland was officially confirmed. I believe that this preliminary study will provide useful data for assessing public attitudes toward vulnerable people in times of crisis.