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Some microorganisms wait until their hosts unwittingly give them the signal to begin growing and killing them before viruses start to "watch" them and attack them.                                                                                                                       Many people imagine a virus as a horrible spiky ball, essentially a mindless killer that enters a cell and commandeers its machinery to generate a billion copies of itself before bursting out, especially after more than two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. The term "mindless killer" is fundamentally accurate for numerous viruses, including the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, serves ...

A group of Mount Sinai researchers have created a high-resolution crystal structure of an enzyme required for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, to survive. The discovery may aid in the development of critically needed new antivirals to fight coronaviruses both now and in the future. The RNA methyltransferase domain, a crucial component of the enzyme known as nsp14, is present. The three-dimensional crystal structure of this region has defied prior attempts by the scientific community to characterize it. The novel procedure is described in a publication that was released in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology's online edition on September 8. Aneel Aggarwal, PhD, a senior author on the paper, notes that being able to see the methyltransferase domain of nsp14 in high resolution provides insights into how to build tiny compounds that fit into its active site and thereby hinder its crucial chemistry. At Mount Sinai's Icahn School of Medicine, he has the title of Prof...