Fielding, Burtram C.Suliman, Tasnim2013-10-122013-10-122009Fielding, B. & Suliman, T. (2009). Comparative analysis of human coronavirus-NL63 ORF3 protein homologues. African Journal of Biotechnology, 8(14): 3175-31781684–5315http://hdl.handle.net/10566/742It has been reported in some studies that the newly discovered human coronavirus NL-63 (HCoVNL63) is one of the most common coronaviruses associated with acute respiratory infections. HCoVNL63 was first isolated in 2004 from a 7 month old infant in Holland. The HCoV-NL63 genome encodes for one accessory protein, ORF3. This reports the computational analysis of human coronavirus NL63 ORF3 by comparing the amino acid sequences of coronavirus ORF3-homologues. The HCoV-NL63 ORF3 gene was found to encode a putative protein ~25.6 kDa in size. ORF3 was predicted to contain three potential transmembrane regions. The amino acid sequence of HCoVNL63 ORF3 was shown to be most similar to HCoV 229E ORF4 (43% identity; 62% similarity).en© 2009 Fielding & Suliman; licensee Academic Journals. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Human coronavirusNL-63Accessory protein ORF3Gene analysisArticle