Structural interactions between pandemic SARS-CoV-2 spike glycoprotein and human Furin protease

  1. Naveen Vankadari

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Abstract

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is an urgent global public health emergency and warrants investigating molecular and structural studies addressing the dynamics of viral proteins involved in host cell adhesion. The recent comparative genomic studies highlight the insertion of Furin protease site in the SARS-CoV-2 spike glycoprotein alerting possible modification in the viral spike protein and its eventual entry to host cell and presence of Furin site implicated to virulence. Here we structurally show how Furin interacts with the SARS-CoV-2 spike glycoprotein homotrimer at S1/S2 region, which underlined the mechanism and mode of action, which is a key for host cell entry. Unravelling the structural features of biding site opens the arena in rising bonafide antibodies targeting to block the Furin cleavage and have great implications in the development of Furin inhibitors or therapeutics.

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    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.04.10.036533: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

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    Table 2: Resources

    Software and Algorithms
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    Further validation and refinement was completed by ensuring that the residues occupied Ramachandran favoured positions using Coot (www.mrc-imb.cam.uk/).
    Coot
    suggested: (Coot, RRID:SCR_014222)

    Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your data.

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No funding statement was detected.
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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2020.04.10.036533 on bioRxiv