Zhang Xinzheng's research team and Tsinghua University Xiang Ye's research team cooperated to reveal the Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus binding receptor...

On October 13, 2021, " Nature " magazine published online the research paper "Structure of Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus with its receptor LDLRAD3", which was completed by Zhang Xinzheng's group of Institute of Biophysics of Chinese Academy of Sciences and Xiang Ye's group of Tsinghua University School of Medicine.

VEEV is an RNA-enveloped virus that can infect humans and all equine animals.

Recently, LDLRAD3 (low-density lipoprotein receptor 3 with class A domain) has been identified as the cell receptor of VEEV [1], but the molecular mechanism of VEEV binding to the receptor is still unclear

Other alphaviruses such as Chikungunya virus (CHIKV) and the receptor Mxra8 are also partly located in the cracks between the spike proteins, but Chikungunya virus lacks the LDLRAD3 in the cracks between the spike E proteins.

This work benefited from the early-developed cryo-electron microscopy reconstruction technology-the block reconstruction algorithm [2], which is the first quasi-atomic resolution alphavirus (Sindbis virus) after the block reconstruction algorithm was used in 2018.

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Article link: https:// align="justify">Related literature:

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(Contribution: Zhang Xinzheng Research Group)