Like a pirate kidnapping a ship, a virus seizes an inflamed mobile because each virus depends on the molecular resources of the mobile and the machines to multiply. This also applies to SARS-CoV-2, the causal agent of the COVID-19 pandemic. at ETH Zurich and the University of Bern have discovered a mechanism that uses the corona virus to announce the production of its proteins compared to those of mobile. This mechanism leads mobiles to particularly decrease the production of their own proteins and instead produce almost exclusively viral proteins, which not only stimulates the production of new viruses, but also inhibits the immune reaction opposed to corona infection.
Once the virus enters a human mobile, a SARS-CoV-2 infection, the NSP1 viral protein is produced as one of the first viral proteins. It was already known of other crown viruses that NSP1 inhibits the production of mobile proteins, but participating teams from ETH Zurich and the University of Bern have discovered how NSP1 inhibits mobile protein production. These paintings are now published in the press and complement the independent effects received on a subject that were recently published through a team of studies in Germany.
A point for the development of vaccines and medicines
Ribosomes are the cellular machinery that produces proteins. They read the plane, the so-called messenger RNA, of a given protein and combine the amino acids in the corresponding order. When read, messenger RNA passes through a channel in the ribosome. Researchers can simply show that NSP1 joins this channel and therefore blocks ribosome. Using cryoelectronic microscopy, the binding of NSP1 in the ribosome channel can be diluted with atomic resolution. “This detailed symbol provides vital data for the prospective design of a drug that can prevent you from binding NSP1 without interfering with ribosomal function. If NSP1 can no longer interact with ribosome, this allows activation of cellular defense systems. They can prevent viral replication,” says Nenad Ban, professor of molecular biology at ETH Zurich and co-author of the study.
Using biochemical and cellular experiments, researchers had to demonstrate that NSP1 is only sufficient to inhibit protein production. Based on the detailed symbol of NSP1 bonding mode, researchers had to produce changed variants of NSP1 that lost their inhibitory effect. -2 viruses with inactive variants of the NSP1 protein are most likely to be mitigated as they can no longer cause serious illnesses. These attenuated viruses can potentially be used as a vaccine, a precept on which many other vaccines opposed to viral diseases are already found. Established.