How the coronavirus infects cells - and why Delta is so dangerous
The coronavirus has a luxurious sugar coat. "This is striking," thought Rommie Amaro, staring at his computer simulator at one of the SARS-CoV-2 branded proteins that protrude from the surface of the virus.
It was moistened with sugar molecules, known as glycans. "When you see it with all the glycans, it's almost unrecognizable," says Amaro, a physicist and chemist at the University of California, San Diego.
Many viruses have the glycan that covers their outer proteins and hides them from the human immune system like a wolf in sheep's clothing. But last year, Amaro's laboratory team and colleagues created the most detailed imagery to date on this mantle, based on structural and genetic data and the formation of atom by atom with a supercomputer.
On March 22, 2020, she posted the simulation on Twitter. Within an hour, one scientist asked in a comment: what was the naked, uncoated loop that emerged from the protein? Amaro had no idea. But ten minutes later, architectural biologist Jason McLellan of the University of Texas at Austin said: The uncoated loop was a receptor binding domain (RBD), one of the top three components that bind to receptors on human cells
