Open Access

Jennifer Vögele, Jan Ferner, Nadide Altınçekiç, Jasleen Kaur Bains, Betül Ceylan, Boris Fürtig, J. Tassilo Grün, Martin Hengesbach, Katharina Felicitas Hohmann, Daniel Hymon, Božana Knežić, Frank Löhr, Stephen A. Peter, Dennis Joshua Pyper, Nusrat Qureshi, Christian Richter, Andreas Schlundt, Harald Schwalbe, Elke Stirnal, Alexey Sudakov, Anna Wacker, Julia Weigand, Julia Wirmer-Bartoschek, Jens Wöhnert, Elke Duchardt-Ferner

• The SARS-CoV-2 virus is the cause of the respiratory disease COVID-19. As of today, therapeutic interventions in severe COVID-19 cases are still not available as no effective therapeutics have been developed so far. Despite the ongoing development of a number of effective vaccines, therapeutics to fight the disease once it has been contracted will still be required. Promising targets for the development of antiviral agents against SARS-CoV-2 can be found in the viral RNA genome. The 5′- and 3′-genomic ends of the 30 kb SCoV-2 genome are highly conserved among Betacoronaviruses and contain structured RNA elements involved in the translation and replication of the viral genome. The 40 nucleotides (nt) long highly conserved stem-loop 4 (5_SL4) is located within the 5′-untranslated region (5′-UTR) important for viral replication. 5_SL4 features an extended stem structure disrupted by several pyrimidine mismatches and is capped by a pentaloop. Here, we report extensive 1H, 13C, 15N and 31P resonance assignments of 5_SL4 as the basis for in-depth structural and ligand screening studies by solution NMR spectroscopy.