Researchers located in both China and the United States have figured out how the coronavirus COVID-19 makes people sick.
According the researchers from the Westlake University in Hangzhou, China, and the University of Texas at Austin, a new understanding has been developed for how the coronavirus binds itself with human respiratory cells. The paper, which has been published in the journal Science has detailed that researchers have located the the specific trojan horse that causes humans to start to be infected by the virus.
Researchers located what is called a spike protein, and Qiang Zhou’s team in Hangzhou managed to figure out how the spike protein works. Using a tool called cryo-electron microscopy, the team was able to find that the virus has a binding pattern that is very similar to what caused the SARS outbreak back in 2003. The researchers did find that there are some differences in COVID-19’s amino acids, but now that those differences have been identified scientists can work towards the development of drugs that would work directly against the way the virus spreads.
It has also been found that these medications can aggravate coronavirus cases, more on that can be found here.
Last updated: Mar 17, 2020 at 07:12 am CDT
