Scientists believe bats first transmitted SARS-CoV-2 to humans in December 2019, and although the virus has since evolved into several variants such as delta and omicron, a new study indicates that the virus is still highly transmissible between mammals. Researchers at the Rochester Institute of Technology have developed computer simulations that show that coronaviruses use their spike proteins to attach to host cells in bats and humans in much the same way.
The findings were published in a Royal Society Open Science study conducted by recent RIT alumnus Madhusudan Rajendran ’22 MS (Bioinformatics) and Associate Professor Gregory Babbitt of the Thomas H. Gosnell School of Life Sciences. They studied how viral spike proteins from several SARS-CoV-2 variants interact with host cell receptors known as ACE2 in humans and various bats of the genus Rhinolophus. Babbitt said the results were surprising.
“We were hoping to see some really cool adaptive evolution happening as the virus got more used to humans and less to bats, but we actually found there wasn’t much change,” Babbitt said. . “Because this binding site hasn’t evolved that much, there’s really not much stopping it from being passed from humans to bats. If you look at the phylogenetic relationships of bats to humans, we’re pretty far apart on the mammalian tree. So that suggests that there would be quite widespread cross-species infectivity, and the literature showed that there was plenty of evidence for that. »
The scientists used a computer simulation method called molecular dynamics to place the proteins in a solvated simulation and then watch them move. The approach uses high-performance computing on graphics processors to show what each atom is doing over time. Babbitt said this approach allows scientists to study questions that cannot be answered in a traditional laboratory.
“It would be dangerous to do experiments where we re-infect bats with human viral strains, so our computer simulations offered a much safer alternative,” Babbitt said.
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Materials provided by Rochester Institute of Technology. Original written by Luke Auburn. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.