The genome of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) encodes for several non-structural proteins (NSP) involved in viral replication and propagation, with NSP13 known to play a role in RNA unwinding and subsequent transcription of the single-stranded template.
The NSP13 helicase may be inhibited by preventing interaction with target DNA. In a paper recently uploaded to the preprint server bioRxiv*, the impact of specific DNA lesions is investigated regarding the unwinding activity of NSP13.