Chemistry has a key role to play in understanding everything from viral structure to pathogenesis, isolation of vaccines and therapies, as well as in the development of materials and techniques used by basic researchers, virologists and clinicians. This Virtual Issue aims to provide a brief overview of the important contributions of chemistry to understanding and controlling the spread of coronaviruses and includes articles from ACS Infectious Diseases, ACS Chemical Biology, Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, Biochemistry, Chemical Reviews, and ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces as well as the preprint server ChemRxiv. We hope the research contained in this Virtual Issue will provide you with important insight into challenges and approaches in virus research.

A new coronavirus disease, COVID-19, emerged in December in the mainland Chinese city of Wuhan, and the outbreak shows no signs of abating, partly because transmission is not yet fully understood. As scientists probe the biology of the virus and investigate treatments, they are also drawing on a solid body of existing research. An article in the Annual Review of Virology provides an evolutionary perspective on coronaviruses, which, in addition to causing respiratory diseases in people, infect a wide range of birds and mammals. The Annual Review of Microbiology offers a deep dive into how human coronaviruses interact with us; of the six previously identified coronaviruses infecting people, four in circulation probably contribute to 15 percent to 30 percent of cases of the common cold.

his microsite provides links and references to all relevant COVID-19 research articles, book chapters and information that can be freely accessed on Taylor & Francis Online and Taylor & Francis ebooks in support of the global efforts in diagnosis, treatment, prevention and further research into COVID-19. As signatories to NIH’s Access to Research initiative, along with the Wellcome Trust’s coordinated action on sharing research data and findings relevant to the outbreak, Taylor & Francis has been working with WHO to ensure this content is clearly signposted. We are also aligning the OSTP’s initiative to centralise resources on PubMed and are currently working with them to ensure rapid human and machine-readable access (where possible) to research articles and data through the NLM’s LitCovid portal.