SARS-cov-2 spikes : mechanisms and visualization by Frederic Cazals@MASIM SARS Cov2 event (Nov 2020)
Channel: GT-MASIM
Date: 2020-12-28

Presentation delivered by Frederic Cazals (PhD, Senior Scientist@Inria Sophia, France) during a series of talks organized in Nov 2020 by the French MASIM research group, dedicated to the structural bioinformatics aspects of SARS-CoV-2 research.

"Spikes of SARS-cov-2 : mechanisms and visualization"
Abstract: Enveloped viruses, including SARS-Cov-2, perform infection by fusing their envelope with the membrane of the target cell. The protein involved, a homotrimeric class I fusion protein called protein S, accomplishes this task via a complex and highly dynamic mechanism with two main steps separated by a cleavage step.The first part of the talk will review this mechanism, based upon the  10 high resolution structures published to date since March 2020. In the second part, I will present a visualization tool, called MISA for Multiple Interface String Alignment, displaying sequence and structure-based pieces of information, of bound and/or unbound proteins.As an illustration, we will scrutinize the spike protein, analyzing which regions are stable or not before/after binding, and also studying the binding competition between the cognate partner of protein S in human (ACE2),and antibodies targeting the so-called receptor binding domain of protein S. MISAs are available in the SBL from https://sbl.inria.fr/doc/Multiple_interface_string_alignment-user-manual.html
URL/DOI: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.09.03.281600

MASIM is a research group within the French CNRS research network for bioinformatics (GdR BIM). Its goal is to promote collaborations and the dissemination of algorithmic methods for structural bioinformatics through an interdisciplinary dialogue involving, but not limited to, Biologists, Computer scientists, Chemists, Mathematicians and Physicists.