honey and royal jelly natural products as possible antiviral nominations to combat sars-cov-2 main protease

the new type of coronavirus called severe acute respiratory corona virus-2 (sars-cov-2) has spread over the globe, left the world in lockdown, and taken more lives globally. hence, more countries have taken restricted policies including quarantine to protect people. however, this was not a promising agent to tackle the existing crisis, so it could become burden on the scientists’ shoulders to come up with noble ideas and bring high-safe vaccines and antiviral drugs to combat the covid-19 pandemic. so far, vaccines and drugs like paxlovid and molnupiravir have been developed to effectively change the pandemic course if clinical trials will prove their efficiency. however, no fdaapproved antiviral drugs against sars-cov-2 yet exist. to gain these types of antiviral drugs, computer-aided drug design techniques play a notable role. of these approaches, molecular docking can screen bio-active compounds and test their potential to specific targets. herein, we screened bio-active compounds of royal jelly and honey against sars-cov-2 main protease in order to investigate their antiviral potency conducting in vivo and in vitro tests. among the tested natural products, 4 compounds, namely erlose, kaempferol glucoside, iridin, and luteolin glucoside (cynaroside) showed the lowest binding energies of - 10.2, -9.6, -9.0, and -8.4 kcal/mol, respectively. then, two marketed drugs, i.e. indinavir and lopinavir, were chosen as standard drugs. among all, erlose and kaempferol glucoside represented excellent antiviral peculiarities against covid-19 main protease, and may be on the call for future clinical trials to approve their potency.