As the pandemic hit back in 2019, an influx of pet adoptions occurred as more people were spending time home alone and saw the need for a companion. While SARS-CoV-2 is still circulating the globe, and mutating into different strains, people are continuing to work from home close to their animals. Evidence has shown that animals like dogs, cats, minks, and ferrets can contract the disease from their human counterparts, however, it is unclear if humans can contract the disease back from their animal companions [6]. While we have seen these Coronavirus outbreaks continually occur in the past several decades, we must be properly knowledgeable on the transmission capabilities of the virus to combat another wave of a SARS outbreak for future decades to come. Earlier coronavirus’ present in veterinary medicine has been noted to progress into more fatal and aggressive diseases when transmitted from one species to another [7], and therefore it is just as important that we understand the transmission possibilities of the virus in animals as we do ourselves. To determine if our pets can transmit the virus to us humans, a study is proposed where canines are purposefully inoculated with a selected SARS-Cov-2 virus and exposed to human volunteers to determine if the virus can spill back from canines to humans. To determine which virus strain will be utilized for the study, data regarding potential strain hosts will be collected from directly ill volunteers who also own canines prior to inoculation.

An effort to experiment on the novel Usutu virus in pure in silico methods was made to determine conformational changes with non polar point mutations in the amino acid sequence. The first method consisted of creating a Python program to exhaustively identify codons, amino acids, and dinucleotide bridges & nonbridges, including viral characteristics defined by Mollentze in 2021. The second method consisted of creating point mutations to non polar amino acids in deemed key sites of the Usutu virus envelope protein and finding the RMSD from the original structure. This resulted in one of two outcomes - either the experiment showed that the Usutu virus envelope protein is highly resistant to point mutations or in silico methods are inconsistent and biased, leading to inaccuracy.