Pocket feature shared by deadly coronaviruses could lead to pan-coronavirus antiviral treatment
It has remained a mystery as to why some coronaviruses are more likely to cause severe disease. The researchers of the University of Bristol-led study say their findings could lead to the development of a pan-coronavirus treatment to defeat all coronaviruses.
A new study that scrutinized the spike glycoproteins decorating all coronaviruses has determined that they are structurally related to human Ige receptors.
In a study, a tailor-made pocket feature in the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, first discovered in 2020, is found to be present in all deadly coronaviruses, including MERS.
In contrast, the pocket domain is not present in corona viruses that cause mild infection with cold-like symptoms.
The pocket, which binds a small molecule, linoleic acid, is an essential fatty acid indispensable for many cellular functions including inflammation and maintaining cell membranes in the lungs.
The original Wuhan strain was the one that started the epidemic. omicron, the current dominating variant of concern, is one of the many dangerous SARS-CoV-2 variants that have emerged since then.
Omicron has evolved over time into a much more dangerous strain. Its evolution enabled it to escape immune protection offered by vaccinations and antibody treatments.
while everything else has changed, the researchers found that the pocket in Omeg remained virtually unchanged.
When we realized that the pocket we had found was the same as before, we asked if the two other deadly coronaviruses, which caused previous outbreaks years ago, also had the linoleic acid binding pocket feature.
High-resolution electron cryo-microscopy, cutting-edge computational approaches, and cloud computing were all applied by the team.
Their results showed that the same mechanism could be used for both the pocket and the binding of the ligand, linoleic acid.
The current study shows that the pocket remained the same in all deadly coronaviruses, from the first outbreak 20 years ago to the current one.
We now show that linoleic acid suppresses the replication of the virus inside cells. The pocket, which we can exploit to defeat the virus, will be contained in future versions.