Abstract
While vaccines are vital for preventing COVID-19 infections, it is critical to develop new therapies to treat patients who become infected. Pharmacological targeting of a host factor required for viral replication can suppress viral spread with a low probability of viral mutation leading to resistance. In particular, host kinases are highly druggable targets and a number of conserved coronavirus proteins, notably the nucleoprotein (N), require phosphorylation for full functionality. In order to understand how targeting kinases could be used to compromise viral replication, we used a combination of phosphoproteomics and bioinformatics as well as genetic and pharmacological kinase inhibition to define the enzymes important for SARS-CoV-2 N protein phosphorylation and viral replication. From these data, we propose a model whereby SRPK1/2 initiates phosphorylation of the N protein, which primes for further phosphorylation by GSK-3a/b and CK1 to achieve extensive phosphorylation of the N protein SR-rich domain. Importantly, we were able to leverage our data to identify an FDA-approved kinase inhibitor, Alectinib, that suppresses N phosphorylation by SRPK1/2 and limits SARS-CoV-2 replication. Together, these data suggest that repurposing or developing novel host-kinase directed therapies may be an efficacious strategy to prevent or treat COVID-19 and other coronavirus-mediated diseases.
Full Text Availability
The license terms selected by the author(s) for this preprint version do not permit archiving in PMC. The full text is available from the preprint server.