Characterisation of Gene Features in Monkey Pox Virus Suggests Molecular Reasons for Its Potential High Virulence and Pathogenicity

Monkey pox virus has caused two major outbreaks in the past 4 years. Transmission of the virus is via close person-to-person contact, which suggests that the virus is of high virulence and pathogenicity. This work reports evidence gleaned from an in-house MATLAB open reading frame finder applied to the GenBank assembled genome of monkey pox virus. Using the data in the output file of the software that includes gene sequence, gene length, gene molecular weight, amino acid sequence of gene, protein molecular weight, and isoelectric point of protein, two significant results were observed. Firstly, profiling for genes of length more than 60 base pair reveal a total of 255 candidate genes, of which more than 200 are of protein length between 20 to 80 plus amino acids. Secondly, plotting the protein isoelectric point and molecular weight in a theoretical 2D protein gel plot shows that there are clusters of viral proteins of different molecular weight at different pH values from pH 4 to 12. In particular, there is a large cluster of proteins between pH 8 and 10, which suggests that alkaline blood pH may promote monkey pox virus virulence. However, absence of many proteins in the pH range of around 5, points to a potential therapeutic window where modulation and control of blood pH at 5, may provide symptomatic relief for the patient, while awaiting the patient’s immune response to degrade the viral particles in the blood.