The recent outbreak of the deadly coronavirus disease 19 (COVID‐19) pandemic poses serious health concerns around the world. The lack of approved drugs or vaccines continues to be a challenge and further necessitates the discovery of new therapeutic molecules. Computer‐aided drug design has helped to expedite the drug discovery and development process by minimizing the cost and time. In this review article, we highlight two important categories of computer‐aided drug design (CADD), viz., the ligand‐based as well as structured‐based drug discovery. Various molecular modeling techniques involved in structure‐based drug design are molecular docking and molecular dynamic simulation, whereas ligand‐based drug design includes pharmacophore modeling, quantitative structure‐activity relationship (QSARs), and artificial intelligence (AI). We have briefly discussed the significance of computer‐aided drug design in the context of COVID‐19 and how the researchers continue to rely on these computational techniques in the rapid identification of promising drug candidate molecules against various drug targets implicated in the pathogenesis of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‐CoV‐2). The structural elucidation of pharmacological drug targets and the discovery of preclinical drug candidate molecules have accelerated both structure‐based as well as ligand‐based drug design. This review article will help the clinicians and researchers to exploit the immense potential of computer‐aided drug design in designing and identification of drug molecules and thereby helping in the management of fatal disease.

The discipline taxonomy (the science of naming and classifying organisms, the original bioinformatics and a basis for all biology) is fundamentally important in ensuring the quality of life of future human generation on the earth; yet over the past few decades, the teaching and research funding in taxonomy have declined because of its classical way of practice which lead the discipline many a times to a subject of opinion, and this ultimately gave birth to several problems and challenges, and therefore the taxonomist became an endangered race in the era of genomics. Now taxonomy suddenly became fashionable again due to revolutionary approaches in taxonomy called DNA barcoding (a novel technology to provide rapid, accurate, and automated species identifications using short orthologous DNA sequences). In DNA barcoding, complete data set can be obtained from a single specimen irrespective to morphological or life stage characters. The core idea of DNA barcoding is based on the fact that the highly conserved stretches of DNA, either coding or non coding regions, vary at very minor degree during the evolution within the species. Sequences suggested to be useful in DNA barcoding include cytoplasmic mitochondrial DNA (e.g. cox1) and chloroplast DNA (e.g. rbcL, trnL-F, matK, ndhF, and atpB rbcL), and nuclear DNA (ITS, and house keeping genes e.g. gapdh). The plant DNA barcoding is now transitioning the epitome of species identification; and thus, ultimately helping in the molecularization of taxonomy, a need of the hour. The 'DNA barcodes' show promise in providing a practical, standardized, species-level identification tool that can be used for biodiversity assessment, life history and ecological studies, forensic analysis, and many more.