Abstract
The SARS-CoV-2 virus is responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic the world experience since 2019. The protein responsible for the first steps of cell invasion, the spike protein, has probably received the most attention in light of its central role during infection. Computational approaches are among the tools employed by the scientific community in the enormous effort to study this new affliction. One of these methods, namely molecular dynamics (MD), has been used to characterize the function of the spike protein at the atomic level and unveil its structural features from a dynamic perspective. In this review, we focus on these main findings, including spike protein flexibility, rare S protein conformational changes, cryptic epitopes, the role of glycans, drug repurposing, and the effect of spike protein variants.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 2200060 |
| Number of pages | 14 |
| Journal | BioEssays |
| Volume | 44 |
| Issue number | 9 |
| Early online date | 17 Jul 2022 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Sept 2022 |
Bibliographical note
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/),which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Funder
Funding Information: Ludovico Pipitò and Roxana-Maria Rujan are grateful for the receipt of a Coventry University Studentship. Publisher Copyright: © 2022
Keywords
- SARS-Cov-2
- drug repurposing
- epitope
- glycans
- molecular dynamics
- spike protein
- variant
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology(all)