Publishing in the journal, eBioMedicine, a team of Washington State University researchers used a computational approach based on network science to distinguish between a group of coronaviruses that can infect human cells from those that can’t.
Cross-species transmission of coronaviruses poses a serious threat to global health.
SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind the ongoing pandemic, is one of several related viruses that uses its spike protein to infect cells by attaching to a receptor protein called angiotensin converting enzyme 2 .
When the team focused their attention on a small part of the spike protein used by some coronaviruses to bind to receptors, they discovered that their network map had arranged the viruses into clusters that separated those that can infect human cells and those that can’t.
Letko’s team specializes in the study of how viruses infect cells and was able to demonstrate that this region of the spike protein can actually allow non-infectious, virus-like particles to invade human cell cultures.