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New and incredibly detailed images of coronavirus, revealing its spike shape and interaction with human cells, created and announced by a team of scientists from China, in an important milestone on the road to the search for the long-awaited vaccine.
THE Dr. Sai Li, a biologist in Beijing Tsinghua University, worked with virologists trying to “analyze” the virus in a biosafety laboratory in Hangzhou.
The virologists treated the virus with a chemical to make it harmless and sent a sample of a virus-filled liquid to Li.
Then he and his team reduced the virus to a drop, which Li dealt with and then looked at at high resolution through a cryoelectron microscope.
“I saw a screen full of viruses”, Li revealed to New York Times, looking at something less than a millionth of an inch in size. “I thought I was the first guy in the world to see the virus in such good resolution.” added.
Li’s work allowed scientists to learn how the virus and some of its proteins “glide” into cells and showed how its genes occupy the body’s biochemistry.
Researchers have observed how some viral proteins serve to destroy the human body’s cell-making factories, while others “build” nurseries to produce new viruses.
And some researchers are using supercomputers to create complete virtual viruses that they hope to use to understand how real viruses spread and cause disasters so easily.
“This time it’s different for us, just in terms of bombarding new data,” he said. He said Rommie amaro, a biologist at the University of California. Amaro and his team are studying proteins, called “spikes,” that rest on the surface of the virus. The “spikes” are used by a virus to adhere to cells in our airways so that the virus can enter. His team, using Li’s images, realized that the spikes were not rigid, but were constantly bending.
The constant rotation of the proteins that make up the “peaks” was observed by a biophysicist in Max Planck Institute for Biophysics from Germany, Gerhard Hummer, who believes that the “spikes” are flexible, so that they can rotate and have the maximum probability of “hooking” in the cells of the airways. However, their flexibility means that they are more vulnerable to antibody attack. And this is one element that scientists are trying to use in their efforts to find an effective treatment …
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