by Karishma Abhishek on December 22, 2020 at 10:51 PM
COVID-19 causing coronaviruses have protein spikes on their surfaces that help the virus bind with the host receptors cells - first step of infection. Scientists have decoded the first detailed images of those spikes in their natural state, while still attached to the virus using cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM) and computation techniques as per a study published in the journal Quarterly Reviews Biophysics Discovery.
This serves as the critical step in designing therapeutic drugs and vaccines against the virus. The advantage of doing it this way is that when you purify a spike protein and study it in isolation, you lose important biological context: How does it look in an intact virus particle? It could possibly have a different structure there, says Wah Chiu, a professor at DOE s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University and senior author of the study.