Know your enemy intimately to better exploit their flaws. Barely four months after the man encountered this new pathogen with the barbaric name, several teams from an international consortium including the University of California, the University of Mount Sinai (New York) and the Institut Pasteur (Paris ), publish in Naturean almost complete map of the interactions between Sars-CoV-2 proteins and a large panel of human proteins. Alias, the coronavirus "interactome".
The authors studied 26 of the 29 proteins of the coronavirus and identified no less than 332 interactions with human proteins. "Like all viruses, Sars-CoV-2 is a professional hacker , " explains Professor Emmanuel Drouet, virologist at the University of Grenoble-Alpes. It therefore interacts in all directions with our cells. Essentially, says the researcher, "with innate immunity pathways" (the virus "disconnects" the circuits responsible for fighting pathogens before the appearance of specific antibodies)
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