New coronavirus infection of human cells has a "door" to help research new therapies

There is a "door" for the new coronavirus to infect human cells

Helps research new treatments

International war "epidemic" operation

Science and Technology Daily, Beijing, August 22 (Reporter Liu Xia) It is well known that the new coronavirus infects humans mainly through the binding of the spike protein on the surface of the virus to the human ACE2 receptor, but does this "story" have more details? American scientists wrote an article in the journal Nature Chemistry on the 19th and pointed out that they discovered how glycoprotein molecules assembled around the spike protein form sugar residues and act as the "gate" and this "gate" for the new coronavirus to infect the human body.

The glycan coating of the spike protein deceives the human immune system.

However, in the latest research, a team of scientists led by Romney Amaro, a biophysical chemist at the University of California, San Diego, used supercomputing simulations and found that these "glycan gates" would change from one state (closed) to Another state (open)

The computationally intensive simulations were first run on the "Comet Supercomputing" at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and then on the "Longhorn" at the Texas Advanced Computing Center.

Subsequently, a team led by Jason McClellan, associate professor of molecular biology at the University of Utah at Austin, created variants of the spike protein and tested how the lack of glycan gates affects the opening ability of RBD

Amaro said that he has basically figured out how the spike protein opens and infects the human body