Monster or Machine? A Profile of the Coronavirus at 6 Months

The information at stake is genetic: instructions to make more virus. Unlike a truly living organism, a virus cannot replicate on its own; it cannot move, grow, persist or perpetuate. It needs a host. The viral code breaks into a living cell, hijacks the genetic machinery and instructs it to produce new code — new virus.

“We are really early in this disease,” Dr. Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, told The New York Times recently. “If this were a baseball game, it would be the second inning.” “We’re mounting a reaction against the virus that is truly unprecedented,” said Dr. Melanie Ott, director of the Gladstone Institute of Virology in San Francisco.

The scientists had gathered fluid samples from three patients and, with nucleic-acid extractors and other tools, compared the genome of the pathogen with that of known ones. A transmission electron microscope revealed the culprit: spherical, with “quite distinctive spikes” reminiscent of a crown or the corona of the sun. It was a coronavirus, and a novel one.

There are hundreds of kinds of coronaviruses. Two, SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, can be deadly; four cause one-third of common colds. Many infect animals with which humans associate, including camels, cats, chickens and bats. All are RNA viruses. Our coronavirus, like the others, is a string of roughly 30,000 biochemical building blocks called nucleotides enclosed in a membrane of both protein and lipid.

For medical researchers, these proteins are key to understanding why the virus is so successful, and how it might be neutralized. For instance, to break into a cell, the S protein binds to a receptor called angiotensin converting enzyme 2, or ACE2, like a hand on a doorknob. The S protein on this coronavirus is nearly identical in structure to the one in the first SARS — “SARS Classic” — but some data suggests that it binds to the target enzyme far more strongly.

COVID 19 They finally got it right. It took WD 39 tries

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