Thota Kanishka Rao, Amity University Kolkata
Emerged in 2019, and spread rapidly, the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) impacted economies worldwide, overwhelming health-care systems, as it infected millions causing severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2).
To respond, a worldwide effort has been initiated to develop vaccines and therapeutic agents. For COVID-19 vaccine development, the trimeric SARS-CoV-2 spike– a type 1 fusion machine that encourages virus-cell entry through interlinkage with the ACE2 receptor– is a lead target, as antibodies against it can hinder virus entry. Biotin-labeled molecular probes, comprising particular regions of the SARS-CoV-2 spike, offer assistance within the isolation and characterization of antibodies focusing on this recently emerged pathogen.
The vast majority of the SARS-CoV-2 neutralizing antibodies so far isolated target the receptor-binding domain (RBD) of the spike protein, yet there are different sites in the N-terminal domain and S2 stem domain that have additionally been related with neutralizing action against different beta coronaviruses. Such virus-neutralizing antibodies are looked for as therapeutic and prophylactic specialists.
Researchers, to create these probes, arranged constructs consolidating an N-terminal refinement tag, a site-explicit protease-cleavage site, the probe locale of interest, and a C-terminal grouping focused on by biotin ligase. probe areas included full-length spike ectodomain moreover as various subregions, and that they likewise designed mutants to eliminate recognition of the ACE2 receptor. Yields of biotin-labeled probes from transient transfection amplified from ~0.5 mg/L for the total ectodomain to >5 mg/L for a few subregions. Probes were delineated for antigenicity and ACE2 recognition, and in this way, the structure of the spike ectodomain test was controlled by cryoelectron microscopy. We additionally described neutralizer restricting specificities and cell-sorting capacities of the biotinylated probes. Altogether, structure-based design coupled to proficient purification and biotinylation processes would thus be ready to empower smoothed out advancement of SARS-CoV-2 spike-ectodomain probes.
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Source:
Zhou, T., Teng, I. T., Olia, A. S., Cerutti, G., Gorman, J., Nazzari, A., Shi, W., Tsybovsky, Y., Wang, L., Wang, S., Zhang, B., Zhang, Y., Katsamba, P. S., Petrova, Y., Banach, B. B., Fahad, A. S., Liu, L., Lopez Acevedo, S. N., Madan, B., Oliveira de Souza, M., … Kwong, P. D. (2020). Structure-Based Design with Tag-Based Purification and In-Process Biotinylation Enable Streamlined Development of SARS-CoV-2 Spike Molecular Probes. bioRxiv: the preprint server for biology, 2020.06.22.166033. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.06.22.166033
Study of recovered COVID-19 patients with repeated positive RT-PCR findings in Wuhan, China
Arpita Adhikary, Amity University Kolkata In Wuhan, after two months of corona pandemic recovered patients undergoes RT-PCR results from throat swab specimens and the results of serological COVID-19 rapid diagnostic test (RDT) for SARS-CoV-2 and 7.78% has positive RT-PCR test for SARS-COV2.IgG & dual IgG & IgM antibody is also detected respectively in 84.75% and […]