Molecular Architecture of the SARS-CoV-2 Virus

By H. Yao, Yutong Song, Yong Chen, N. Wu, Jialu Xu, Chujie Sun, Jiaxing Zhang, Tianhao Weng, Zheyuan Zhang, Zhigang Wu and 8 more. bioRxiv, 2020

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Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is an enveloped virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite recent advances in the structural elucidation of SARS-CoV-2 proteins and the complexes of the spike (S) proteins with the cellular receptor ACE2 or neutralizing antibodies, detailed architecture of the intact virus remains to be unveiled. Here we report the molecular assembly of the authentic SARS-CoV-2 virus using cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) and subtomogram averaging (STA). Native structures of the S proteins in both pre- and postfusion conformations were determined to average resolutions of 8.7-11 Å. Compositions of the N-linked glycans from the native spikes were analyzed by mass-spectrometry, which revealed highly similar overall processing states of the native glycans to that of the recombinant glycoprotein glycans. The native conformation of the ribonucleoproteins (RNP) and its higher-order assemblies were revealed. Overall, these characterizations have revealed the architecture of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in unprecedented detail, and shed lights on how the virus packs its ∼30 kb long single-segmented RNA in the ∼80 nm diameter lumen.

Subfields: Ecology, Infectious Diseases

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f36d17c1332677f6035b393a9b73bd7841aaf2e7

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In Infectious Diseases

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COVID-19 and the human innate immune system (2021, background): “, 2020), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) (Kim et al., 2020; Wu et al., 2020; Yao et al., 2020; Zhang and Holmes, 2020) is a rather heterogeneous disease.”