RE: Is anti-viral interferon response a boon to SARS-CoV-2?
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@scienceblocks : I have a very fundamental question: Sorry if it is off-topic. How do virus acquire the lipids for its outer membrane? I know that all viruses have no outer covering. But sars-covid19 has one. Lipid synthesis or self assembly has nothing to do with genetic code from RNA/DNA(but the viral proteins are encoded in their RNA/DNA). Am I right? Can we target the virus while assembling?
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Well there are lot of membrane viruses, aka enveloped viruses. HIV, flu, hepatitis, herpes. The virus take lipids from host membrane. For instance in case of corona virus the proteins - E, M and spike gets into ER. They are transported to the plasma membrane by ER - Golgi route. Somewhere in between the bind to the N protein along with the viral genome and gets wrapped around it.
In fact if you just transfected the cells with spike protein or infected it with a corona virus you will see the spike being expressed in plasma membrane and it causes the cells to fuse and form syncytia. The lipids these proteins interact with are what it tries to take along.
I dont think anyone has put much thought into it but yeah its worth a shot trying to target region on viral proteins that helps it interact with lipids. Though I am not sure if this can be done specifically and how conserved this target site would be. Alternatively, interaction between E, M and N, can be targeted. If a bioinfo study can point out existing drugs that targets anything that may disrupt virus assembly thd drug can be tried in lab for sure.