from today's science magazine article by Derek Lowe

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/03/26/what-the-coronavirus-proteins-are-targeting

excerpts:

What the Coronavirus Proteins Are Targeting

By Derek Lowe 26 March, 2020

paragraph 3

Running the human proteins through a Gene Ontology enrichment analysis to try to sort out functions showed some likely targets and pathways for several of the viral proteins – for example, the viral Nsp7 seems to be involved in nuclear transport processes. As you would expect, there are a lot of signs of the virus attacking the pathways of innate immunity and inflammation. You can even go down to the protein structural domain level and find enrichments – as an example, the viral Nsp1 protein’s human interactors are enriched in DNA polymerase domains, and the viral E protein’s interactors are enriched in BET and acetylated-histone binding domains.  In addition to these sorts of transcriptional targets, some of the processes targeted by the viral proteins include vesicle trafficking, lipoprotein pathways and lipid metabolism, and mitochondrial and cytoskeletal proteins. There are several potential targets in these that could also apply to other pathogens, which is good to know in the long term.

paragraph 5

And the ACE inhibitors are on there, too, which brings up a key point. If you’re just looking at the level of “This compound interacts with this human protein, which apparently interacts with this viral protein”, which is all we can do for now, that doesn’t give you enough mechanistic detail to say if said compound is going to do anything beneficial, to turn out to have no effect, or indeed to possibly make things even worse. This is a very nice paper, but the authors themselves are careful to note that an interactome map like this can’t provide any mechanistic understanding by itself – we have to bring that, via brainpower and further experimentation. Some of these proteins and pathways are being hijacked by the virus or interfered with by it, while others may be involved in fighting it off, so you need to be sure what you’re messing with.