SARS-CoV-2 Spike S2 Refolding: Structural Insights and Inhibition Strategies Against Emerging Variants

During most eukaryotic translation processes, the small 40S ribosome subunit scans an mRNA from its 5' end until it encounters the first start AUG codon. The large 60S ribosomal subunit then joins the smaller one to initiate protein synthesis. The location of the translation initiation is largely determined by the nucleotides near the start codon as there may be multiple translation initiation sites present on the mRNA.  Marilyn Kozak discovered that the sequence RCCAUGG (where R...

A single nucleotide polymorphism or SNP is a single nucleotide variation at a specific genomic position in a large population. It is the most prevalent type of sequence variation found in the human genome. Point mutations that occur in more than 1% of the population qualify as SNPs. These are present once every 1000 nucleotides on an average in the human genome. Replacement of a purine with another purine (A/G) or a pyrimidine with another pyrimidine (C/T) is known as a transition. In contrast,...

Amyloid fibrils are aggregates of misfolded proteins.  Under most circumstances, misfolded proteins are either refolded by chaperone proteins or degraded by the proteasome. However, in the case of a mutation or a disease, these proteins can accumulate to form large clusters and often further assemble to form elongated fibers, called fibrils. 
Amyloid deposits were observed as early as 1639 in the liver and the spleen.   In 1854, Rudolph Virchow performed iodine staining,...

Simple proteins and protein complexes contain only amino acids. In contrast, many other proteins, called conjugated proteins, covalently bond with non-protein moieties.
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...