COVID-19 Drugs: Inhibiting viral replication and transcription
Remdesivir is the first drug to be recommended for treatment of COVID-19. Determining the structure of its target - the viral replication machinery - is an important step in understanding how it blocks viral replication, and how other antivirals could be designed.…
Computational power in the fight against COVID-19
Computational structural biology is a powerful tool in protein design and engineering. Let’s take a look at how it is being used to design protein therapeutics and vaccines targeting SARS-CoV-2…
COVID19 protein-protein wars: designing agents to block infection
The robustness, low cost and ease of production of monobodies and nanobodies make them attractive therapeutic candidates for COVID19. High stability solves the need for cold-chain storage, and offers other routes of administration such as aerosols, which could be attractive for respiratory diseases.…
SARS-CoV-2: structures light the path to vaccines and treatment
Shape of the viral spike revealedTo gain entry into human cells, the SARS-CoV-2 virus uses a “spike” on its surface, that recognizes receptors on human cells.…
SARS-CoV-2: getting the data out there, and getting more from it
The processed X-ray diffraction data used to produce the structures of SARS-Cov-2 proteins are freely available. This means that anyone can improve these models using open source software. Better structures mean more biological insights.…
Structural Biology of SARS-CoV-2
Like many scientific communities, structural biologists have responded extraordinarily quickly in the fight against the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2, also referred to as 2019-nCoV) and the resultant disease COVID-19, by determining the structure of many of the viral proteins.…
It's a small world
Welcome to the PTNG blog. Here I will try to provide a commentary of some of the current news and events in science, medicine and biotech, in the context of structural biology and protein engineering.…