Multidimensional view of the coronavirus proteome
What exactly happens when the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 infects a cell? In an article published in Nature, a team from the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry and the Technical University of Munich (TUM) paints a comprehensive picture of the viral infection process. For the first time, the interaction between the coronavirus and a cell is documented at five different proteomics levels during viral infection. This knowledge will help to gain a better understanding of the virus and find potential starting points for therapies.
When a virus enters a cell, viral and cellular protein molecules begin to interact. Both the replication of the virus and the reaction of the cells are the result of complex protein signaling cascades. A team led by Andreas Pichlmair, Professor of Immunopathology of Viral Infections at the Institute of Virology at TUM, and Matthias Mann, Head of the Department of Proteomics and Signal Transduction at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, has systematically recorded how human lung cells react to individual proteins of the covid-19 pathogen SARS-CoV-2 and the SARS coronavirus, the latter of which has been known for some time.