SARS-CoV-2 N protein antagonizes type I interferon signaling by suppressing phosphorylation and nuclear translocation of STAT1 and STAT2

The outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-2019) has spread rapidly across the globe since late 2019 and has become a pandemic 1 . The causative pathogen of COVID-19 is a novel strain of coronavirus named as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). SARS-CoV-2 is an enveloped virus with single-stranded, positive-sense RNA genome, which belongs to the genus Betacoronavirus of the family Coronaviridae , and is the third coronavirus reported to cause severe respiratory diseases, together with SARS-CoV and Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV). The genomic RNA of SARS-CoV-2 is ~30 kb that contains 12 open reading frames (ORFs), encoding structural proteins envelope (E), spike (S), membrane (M), and nucleocapsid (N).