Inhibition of African swine fever virus protease by myricetin and myricitrin

Abstract

African swine fever (ASF) caused by the ASF virus (ASFV) is the most hazardous swine disease. Since a huge number of pigs have been slaughtered to avoid a pandemic spread, intense studies on the disease should be followed quickly. Recent studies reported that flavonoids have various antiviral activity including ASFV. In this report, ASFV protease was selected as an antiviral target protein to cope with ASF. With a FRET (Fluorescence resonance energy transfer) method, ASFV protease was assayed with a flavonoid library which was composed of sixty-five derivatives classified based on ten different scaffolds. Of these, the flavonols scaffold contains a potential anti-ASFV protease activity. The most prominent flavonol was myricetin with IC₅₀ of 8.4 μM. Its derivative, myricitrin, with the rhamnoside moiety was also showed the profound inhibitory effect on ASFV protease. These two flavonols apparently provide a way to develop anti-ASFV agents based on their scaffold.

Keywords:

• African swine fever virus protease
• antiviral
• flavonoid
• fret
• inhibitory compounds

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Basic Science Research Programmes, 2018R1D1A1B07050781 to DHS and 2018R1D1A1B07050942 to MK, funded by the National Research Foundation of Korea grant granted by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, Republic of Korea (MEST). S. Jo was supported by Brain Korea 21 (BK21) Project.