The researchers explained that coronaviruses, such as those that cause COVID-19, have spike proteins.
They noted that their method, which combines cryogenicmicroscopy and calculations, should produce faster and more realistic images of the infectious apparatus in various strains of coronavirus. Their research will help develop therapeutic drugs and vaccines.
“The advantage of our visualization isthe fact that when you purify the thorn protein and study it on your own, you lose an important biological context: what does it look like in an intact virus particle? After all, there may be a completely different structure, ”said Wa Chiu, professor at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. She works for the Department of Education and Science at Stanford University.
Another gene influencing the severity of COVID-19 has been discovered
Moreover, the virus that causes COVID-19 is sovirulent, that there are only a few cryo-laboratories in the world that can study it with a sufficiently high level of safety for employees. So for this study, a team of scientists studied a much milder strain of coronavirus called NL63, which causes common cold symptoms and is responsible for about 10% of respiratory illnesses each year. It attaches to the same receptors on the surface of human cells as COVID-19.
Instead of chemically removing and purifyingproteins NL63, the researchers frozen whole, intact viruses to a glass state that preserves the natural arrangement of the components. They then took thousands of detailed images of randomly targeted viruses with cryo-EM tools and combined them to produce high-resolution images.
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