Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 15, 2026

Production of Pseudotyped Particles to Study Highly Pathogenic Coronaviruses in a Biosafety Level 2 Setting
Published on: March 1, 2019
Biochemical and biophysical characterization of the transmissible gastroenteritis coronavirus fusion core
Guangpeng Ma1, Youjun Feng, Feng Gao
1Department of Preventive Veterinary, College of Veterinary Medicine, Northeast Agriculture University, 150030 Harbin, PR China.
Abstract:
Transmissible gastroenteritis coronavirus (TGEV) is one of the most destructive agents, responsible for the enteric infections that are lethal for suckling piglets, causing enormous economic loss to the porcine fostering industry every year. Although it has been known that TGEV spiker protein is essential for the viral entry for many years, the detail knowledge of the TGEV fusion protein core is still very limited. Here, we report that TGEV fusion core (HR1-SGGRGG-HR2), in vitro expressed in GST prokaryotic expression system, shares the typical properties of the trimer of coiled-coil heterodimer (six alpha-helix bundle), which has been confirmed by a combined series of biochemical and biophysical evidences including size exclusion chromatography (gel-filtration), chemical crossing, and circular diagram. The 3D homologous structure model presents its most likely structure, extremely similar to those of the coronaviruses documented. Taken together, TGEV spiker protein belongs to the class I fusion protein, characterized by the existence of two heptad-repeat (HR) regions, HR1 and HR2, and the present knowledge about the truncated TGEV fusion protein core may facilitate in the design of the small molecule or polypeptide drugs targeting the membrane fusion between TGEV and its host.
More Related Videos
07:53A Fluorogenic Peptide Cleavage Assay to Screen for Proteolytic Activity: Applications for coronavirus spike protein activation
Published on: January 9, 2019
12:20Bacterial Artificial Chromosomes: A Functional Genomics Tool for the Study of Positive-strand RNA Viruses
Published on: December 29, 2015
Related Concept Videos
SNAREs and Membrane Fusion
SNAREs exist in pairs that symmetrically interact and catalyze the fusion of the lipid bilayers in vesicle and target organelle. v-SNARE in the vesicle membrane are single polypeptide chains that bind to a complementary t-SNARE, composed of 2...
Conjugated Proteins
Nucleoproteins are protein complexes that contain nucleic acids, categorized as deoxyribonucleoproteins (DNPs) or ribonucleoproteins (RNPs) respectively. The nucleosome is a typical example of a DNP where nuclear DNA is associated with histone proteins. The major antigen for the Covid-19 virus SARS-CoV is an RNP that is critical...
Fusion of Secretory Vesicles with the Plasma Membrane
In 1993, Jim Rothman proposed that the antiparallel pairing of vesicular and transmembrane SNAREs, or...
Tagging and Fusion Proteins
Viral Recombination
Export of Misfolded Proteins out of the ER