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December 6, 2020 04:34 pm

New Research Shows What We Can Accomplish by Manipulating Biology

Long-time Slashdot reader sixoh1 shares "an interesting spin on biotechnology tools that we've been seeing explode lately like Crisper-CAS and mRNA." Ars Technica writes:This is in no way a route to a practical therapy, but it does provide a fantastic window into what we can accomplish by manipulating biology. The whole effort described in the new paper is focused on a simple idea: if you figure out how to wreck one of the virus's key proteins, it won't be able to infect anything. And, conveniently, our cells have a system for destroying proteins, since that's often a useful thing to do... This system relies on a small protein called "ubiquitin." When a protein is to be targeted for destruction, enzymes called ubiquitin ligases chemically link a chain of ubiquitins to it. These serve as a tag that is recognized by enzymes that digest any proteins with ubiquitin attached to them. So, the idea behind the new work is to identify a key viral protein and figure out how to attach ubiquitin to it... Unfortunately, there are no proteins that attach ubiquitin to the viral spike protein. Or, rather, there were no proteins that fit that description. But a team at Harvard has now produced one. They fed atomic-level details of the proteins' structure into software that finds the most energetically-favored interactions between proteins, simulated mutations, and eventually engineered the most promising ones to test their efficacy, ultimately cutting the presence of the viral spike protein in tested cells by 60 percent. Ars Technica ultimately calls it "A mildly insane idea for disabling the coronavirus," though "Unfortunately, it's also likely to be absolutely useless... this is likely to be a non-starter, especially given that there are promising vaccines and many other potential therapies ahead of it in the pipeline for safety testing." Yet "while the details of this work aren't really significant, the fact that we've developed all the underlying technology needed for it is worth keeping in mind."

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