RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 In-Silico evidence for two receptors based strategy of SARS-CoV-2
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2020.03.24.006197
DO 10.1101/2020.03.24.006197
A1 Edoardo Milanetti
A1 Mattia Miotto
A1 Lorenzo Di Rienzo
A1 Michele Monti
A1 Giorgio Gosti
A1 Giancarlo Ruocco
YR 2020
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/03/27/2020.03.24.006197.abstract
AB We propose a novel numerical method able to determine efficiently and effectively the relationship of complementarity between portions of proteins surfaces. This innovative and general procedure, based on the representation of the molecular iso-electron density surface in terms of 2D Zernike polynomials, allows the rapid and quantitative assessment of the geometrical shape complementarity between interacting proteins, that was unfeasible with previous methods. We first tested the method with a large dataset of known protein complexes obtaining an overall area under the ROC curve of 0.69 in the blind recognition of binding sites and then applied it to investigate the features of the interaction between the Spike protein of SARS-Cov-2 and human cellular receptors. Our results indicate that SARS-CoV-2 uses a dual strategy: its spike protein could also interact with sialic acid receptors of the cells in the upper airways, in addition to the known interaction with Angiotensin-converting enzyme 2.