Coronavirus forces cells to grow tentacles to help it invade other cells

It’s a molecular monster

The SARS-Cov2 virus can take over and does some pretty cool engineering. (At least in the case of monkey cells.)

The infected cells produce hairy tentacles that poke holes in nearby cells to help spread the virus.

Coronavirus tentacles with small yellow virus particles attached.

So once a virus is inside it can not only hijack the cell to make more viruses (the little yellow prickly balls in the photo) it also forces the cell to make all these hairy tentacles to push the viruses into neighboring cells. Apart from being a neat gee-whiz moment in molecular construction, this is worth knowing because it gives us more targets to aim for. (More moving parts to throw spanners at).

To that end, the team found 87 drugs that are already either FDA approved or in clinical trials that might help. And 7 of them have already shown they can inhibit the virus in both human and monkey cells.

There are some major molecular engineering battles going on

Coronaviruses are larger RNA viruses than most, so that gives the virus more tools to work with. All up we know that there are 27 SARS Cov2 proteins which […]