Fooling the novel coronavirus with a fake handshake to inactivate the virus – News-Medical.Net

Fool the novel coronavirus once and it can’t cause infection of cells, new research suggests.
Scientists have developed protein fragments – called peptides – that fit snugly into a groove on the SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein that it would normally use to access a host cell. These peptides effectively trick the virus into “shaking hands” with a replica rather than with the actual protein on a cell’s surface that lets the virus in.
Previous research has determined that the novel coronavirus binds to a…

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