SARS-CoV Nsp7a was shown to interact with prosurvival protein Bcl-X and induce apoptosis in cells in vitro (Tan et al., 2007). Similarly, ORF3a leads to fragmentation of the Golgi apparatus, and induction of apoptosis (Waye et al., 2005; Freundt et al., 2010). Besides this, ORF3a also implicates necroptotic cell death by interacting with and activating the main necroptosis protein RIPK3 (Yue et al., 2018). Owing to its role in cell death pathways, the ORF3a of SARS-CoV-2 was also explored in this context. This protein similarly induced apoptosis in HEK293 cells by activating the caspase 8-dependent pathway (Ren et al., 2020).