Predicting susceptibility to SARS‐CoV‐2 infection based on structural differences in ACE2 across species

spotlight topic:

Predicting susceptibility to SARS‐CoV‐2 infection based on structural differences in ACE2 across species

Published 25 November 2020

Alexander, M.R. (2020) Predicting susceptibility to SARS‐CoV‐2 infection based on structural differences in ACE2 across species. The FASEB Journal. 34 (2) pp. 15946-15960 https://doi.org/10.1096/fj.202001808R

This paper reports on potential species differences in susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2 using multiple in-depth structural analyses to identify key ACE2 amino acid positions (including 30, 83, 90, 322, and 354) and use these differences to develop a susceptibility score.

The authors conclude that SARS-CoV-2 is nearly optimal for binding ACE2 of humans compared to other animals, which may underlie the highly contagious transmissibility of this virus among humans.

While this study does not give us information about what is happening in terms of infection these species it may provide information to direct future surveillance and research.

0 replies

Leave a Reply

Want to join the discussion?
Feel free to contribute!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.