With decades of efforts and steady progress, Virologica Sinica has become one of high-quality academic journals in Virology with an impact factor 4.327, based on the newly released JCR®2020. Virologica Sinica switches to fully open access in 2022 for faster publishing, greater visibility, and wider connection. Once the article is accepted, it will be directly published in the form of pre-proof on the ScienceDirect domain of Elsevier, the host platform of Virologica Sinica's publishing partner KeAi Communications.
Aiming for a leading journal in Virology, we will continue to serve the scientific community actively and dedicatedly, strive to be the trusted journal that virology scientists constantly choose to publish their important work, and inspire future virology and pertaining multidiscipline researches.
A set of pathogenic human viruses, including SARS-CoV-2, HIV-1, influenza viruses, flaviviruses, Ebola viruses, are artistically presenting on the cover.
Ying Tang, Yiqin Wang, Yuchang Li, Huai Zhao, Sen Zhang, Ying Zhang, Jing Li, Yuehong Chen, Xiaoyan Wu, Chengfeng Qin, Tao Jiang, Xiaoping Kang. An integrated rapid nucleic acid detection assay based on recombinant polymerase amplification for SARS-CoV-2[J]. Virologica Sinica, 2022, 37(1): 138-141. doi: 10.1016/j.virs.2022.01.006.
Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) is a novel coronavirus that causes the outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) (Li et al., 2020a). Viral nucleic acid testing is the standard method for the laboratory diagnosis of COVID-19 (Wu et al., 2020a; Zhu et al., 2020). Currently, a variety of qPCR-based detection kits are used for laboratory-based detection and confirmation of SARS-CoV-2 infection (Corman et al., 2020; Hussein et al., 2020; Ruhan et al., 2020; Veyer et al., 2020). Conventional qPCR involves virus inactivation, nucleic acid extraction, and qPCR amplification procedures. Therefore, the process is complicated, which usually takes longer than 2 h, and requires biosafety laboratories and professional staff. Thus, qPCR is not suitable for use in field or medical units. To reduce the operation steps, automatic integrated qPCR detection systems that combine nucleic acid extraction and qPCR amplification in a sealed cartridge were developed to detect viruses in clinical samples (Li et al., 2020b). However, the detection time is still longer than 1 h. Therefore, rapid nucleic acid detection systems are needed to further improve the detection efficiency.
Abbas Ahmadi Vasmehjani, Farhad Rezaei, Mohammad Farahmand, Talat Mokhtari-Azad, Mohammad Reza Yaghoobi-Ershadi, Mohsen Keshavarz, Hamid Reza Baseri, Morteza Zaim, Mahmood Iranpour, Habibollah Turki, Mohammad Esmaeilpour-Bandboni. Epidemiological evidence of mosquito-borne viruses among persons and vectors in Iran: A study from North to South[J]. Virologica Sinica, 2022, 37(1): 149-152. doi: 10.1016/j.virs.2022.01.005.
Arthropod-borne viruses are a group of the most important emerging pathogens. They cause a range of diseases in vertebrate hosts and threaten human health (Gan and Leo, 2014). The global distribution of arboviruses is associated with the vector which is strongly affected by changes in environmental conditions. Dengue virus (DENV) and Chikungunya virus (CHIKV), which cause high annual infected cases and have an increasing geographic distribution, are transmitted by Aedes spp. mosquitoes, in particular Ae. albopictus and Ae. Aegypti (Presti et al., 2014; Higuera and Ramírez, 2018). Although, the main vector of dengue virus, Ae. aegypti, was not detected in Iran, other possible important vectors such as Ae. Albopictus and Ae. unilineatus were recorded (Doosti et al., 2016; Yaghoobi-Ershadi et al., 2017). West Nile virus (WNV), a member of the genus Flaviviruses, is one of the most widespread arboviruses (Chancey et al., 2015). The epidemiological evidence of WNV in different hosts in Iran was found (Bagheri et al., 2015), and the circulation of WNV in the main vector, Culex pipiens s.l. and Cx. pipiens, has been proved (Shahhosseini et al., 2017). Due to limited information on the situation of CHIKV, DENV and WNV in Iran, we performed a wide geographical investigation to determine the prevalence of IgG specific antibodies in human samples as well as the genome of WNV, CHIKV and DENV in mosquitoes.
Zaira Rehman, Massab Umair, Aamer Ikram, Ammad Fahim, Muhammad Salman. Footprints of SARS-CoV-2 genome diversity in Pakistan, 2020–2021[J]. Virologica Sinica, 2022, 37(1): 153-155. doi: 10.1016/j.virs.2022.01.009.
The rapid spread of SARS-CoV-2 has significantly impacted the worldwide health system. The SARS-CoV-2 currently bears a remarkably low genetic diversity even though it carries one of the largest RNA genomes among viruses (Rausch et al., 2020). However, the coronaviruses harbor the capability of undergoing recombination at a high rate which can lead to the emergence of novel viral derivatives (Rausch et al., 2020; Gribble et al., 2021). This in turn requires not only global surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 genome in various countries but also careful scrutiny in animal genomic reservoirs. Conventionally, RNA viruses evolve with a high mutation rate, however, the presence of ExoN ribonuclease in SARS-CoV-2 genome has made its case different from other viral species (Gribble et al., 2021). The variables of natural selection which potentially drift the SARS-CoV-2 evolutionary dynamics can be recorded by analyzing deposited sequence genomes for its fitness, transmissibility potential, and pathogenicity (Rouchka et al., 2020). This can potentially provide a way to draw a holistic picture at a national level, while simultaneously providing a comparative overview with worldwide sequences.