SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2) is a novel coronavirus responsible for the current COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic, which has hit the world since December 2019. It has spread to about 216 countries worldwide, affecting more than 21.7 million people so far. Although clinical trials of a number of promising antiviral drugs and vaccines against COVID-19 are underway, it is hard to predict how successful these drug- or vaccine-based therapeutics are eventually going to be in combating COVID-19 because most of such therapeutic strategies have failed against human coronaviruses such as SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV (Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus) responsible for similar pandemics in the past. In that context, we would like to bring to scientific attention another group of endogenous regulatory molecules, the small non-coding RNAs, especially the microRNAs, which are found to regulate critical cellular pathways in a number of disease conditions, including RNA viral infections. This review will focus on understanding the effect of altered microRNA expression during coronavirus-mediated infections and how it may provide clues for further exploring the pathogenesis of SARS-CoV-2, with a view of developing RNAi-based therapeutics and biomarkers against COVID-19.

SARS-CoV-2（严重急性呼吸综合征冠状病毒 2）是一种新型冠状病毒，导致当前的 COVID-19（2019 冠状病毒病）大流行，自 2019 年 12 月以来席卷全球。它已传播到全球约 216 个国家，影响迄今为止已有超过 2170 万人。尽管许多有前景的抗病毒药物和针对 COVID-19 的疫苗的临床试验正在进行中，但很难预测这些基于药物或疫苗的疗法最终在对抗 COVID-19 方面会取得多大成功，因为大多数此类治疗策略对抗人类冠状病毒，如 SARS-CoV 和 MERS-CoV（中东呼吸综合征冠状病毒），过去曾引发过类似的流行病，但都失败了。在这种情况下，我们希望引起科学界对另一组内源性调节分子的关注，即小非编码RNA，尤其是microRNA，它们被发现可以调节许多疾病状况（包括RNA病毒感染）中的关键细胞途径。本综述将重点了解冠状病毒介导的感染期间 microRNA 表达改变的影响，以及它如何为进一步探索 SARS-CoV-2 的发病机制提供线索，以期开发针对 COVID-19 的基于 RNAi 的疗法和生物标志物。