RESUMEN
The year 2020 will be marked in history as being the year of the coronavirus global pandemic. Having already passed 1 year since the outbreak of COVID-19, we are yet to establish effective antiviral treatments that are specific for this disease particularly given the strong focus on the design and development of preventative vaccines. The biological and structural characteristics of SARS-CoV-2 will no doubt provide important information that can be harnessed into anti-SARS-CoV-2 therapies to hopefully limit virus-driven morbidity, mortality and dissemination throughout the population. In this chapter, we will provide detail on the SARS-CoV-2 genome and discuss the importance of key encoded proteins essential for this virus to cause such mass global chaos. We will also discuss the diversity of SARS-CoV-2 variants that have so far emerged and their divergence from other coronaviruses. Understanding these important aspects of SARS-CoV-2 will help guide us in our current fight against this devastating disease. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.