Since 2012, more than 1300 cases of Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) have been diagnosed worldwide, the vast majority of which have occurred in Saudi Arabia and over 40% of which have ended in death. In Spring 2014, a large outbreak of MERS originated in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia concentrated in nosocomial settings in Riyadh and Jeddah resulting in over 300 infections. We used publicly...

A comparative statistical analysis of the presence of all possible short subsequences of length 5 to 20 nucleotides in the genomes of more than 250 microbial, viral and multicellular organisms was performed. A remarkable similarity of the presence/absence distributions for different n-mers in all genomes was found. The same analysis applied analytically and numerically to random sequences also ...

Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-CoV) is well known to cause severe respiratory infection and was first reported in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 2012. We report here the first confirmed MERS-CoV infection in the Kingdom of Bahrain in a Saudi gentleman who was admitted electively for coronary bypass surgery, postoperatively developed an acute respiratory illness, and tested p...

Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) is a novel and highly pathogenic human coronavirus and has quickly spread to other countries in the Middle East, Europe, North Africa and Asia since 2012. Previous studies have shown that MERS-CoV ORF4b antagonizes the early antiviral alpha/beta interferon (IFN-α/β) response, which may significantly contribute to MERS-CoV pathogenesis; how...

Motivation: To tackle the problem of huge memory usage associated with de Bruijn graph-based algorithms, upon which some of the most widely used de novo genome assemblers have been built, we released SparseAssembler1. SparseAssembler1 can save as much as 90% memory consumption in comparison with the state-of-art assemblers, but it requires rounds of denoising to accurately assemble genomes. Alg...

Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV), a novel human virus that emerged in 2012, has caused significant respiratory disease and kindled fears of a SARS-like epidemic traversing the world (Hilgenfeld and Peiris, 2013). While lacking the rapid human-to-human spread seen with its SARS-CoV cousin, the outbreak of MERS-CoV has continued in the Middle East over the past three years ...

One year after the occurrence of the first case of infection by the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) there is no clear consensus on the best treatment to propose. The World Health Organization, as well as several other national agencies, are still working on different clinical approaches to implement the most relevant treatment in MERS-CoV infection. We compared innate an...

As of 23 July 2014, 837 laboratory-confirmed cases of Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS-CoV) infection, including 291 deaths, had been reported to the WHO (http://www.who.int /csr/disease/coronavirus_infections/en/), raising concerns about its pandemic potential and calling for the development of vaccines and therapeutics against MERS-CoV infection. We previously identified peptidic HIV-1 ...

The Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) is an important emerging infection in the present day. Since its first origin in Saudi Arabia in 2012, this disease has already spread to several countries worldwide. The outbreak in Asia in 2015 is a present concern (1, 2). The big epidemic in Korea is a big challenge. In addition, other Asian countries including China and Thailand also have the prob...