As new variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus emerge, it remains imperative to continue learning about this pathogen's molecular machinery in order to develop the most effective therapeutic strategies. In this article, Dr Oscar Bastidas and Dr Zoran Sevarac reveal how their latest work identified a structured frequency domain profile in the seemingly stochastic time domain data.COVID-19 CONTINUES to be a worldwide health hazard and pandemic. With new variants continuing to surface and spread, characterising viral proteins that are crucial to the infection process continues to be a pressing research topic.Our research efforts seek to characterise, more thoroughly, the SARS-CoV-2 spike (S) protein, which is a key player in the infection process of host epithelial cells.In our recent study, we assessed molecular dynamics data chronicling the time-dependent behaviour of phi and psi dihedral angles for each residue in each chain of the S protein, to see if there were any defining characteristics in either the time or frequency domains. We identified a distinctive frequency domain profile for the protein, as well as residues that might be of interest to the drug design and vaccine development communities due to their potential association with drug pocket formation and allostery.
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