Walter Mothes - December 2, 2020

Walter Mothes, PhD, Professor of Microbial Pathogenesis, Co-Leader, Cancer Microbiology, Yale School of Medicine, United States, "Real-time conformational dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 spikes on virus particles"

Dr. Mothes group has been working on defining the real-time dynamics of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein which has become a promising vaccine target. Spike protein exists in multiple conformations and is dynamic. Using single-molecular FRET, Dr. Mothes group was able to observe these dynamics in real-time. Interestingly, they also found that antibodies and patient’s plasma stabilized the ground state confirmation of the spike protein, which mimicked the conformation that ACE2 causes when it binds to the spike protein. They also found that some antibodies were also able to allosterically block the activation of the spike protein, locking the spike protein into the down conformation. In the future, these studies will be paired with cryoEM to gain a better understanding of the structural rearrangements of the spike protein.