A novel NMR technique developed in Oxford to study the interactions between cells and pathogens such as influenza and SARS-CoV-2 has been published in Science today.
Congratulations to our DPhil student Charlie Buchanan, who is first author on this paper. The team around this work is made up of researchers from Oxford Chemistry and the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience Discovery, as well as collaborators in the Wellcome Institute Centre for Human Genetics and the Rosalind Franklin Institute, led by the Baldwin, Davis and Naismith groups.

The groups were able to confirm a novel binding mode between the spike protein on the original strain of SARS-CoV-2 and specific sialoside (sugar) residues on proteins inside lung cells. As SARS-CoV-2 mutated, the more infective variants (alpha, beta, delta, omicron) lost this binding function. The method devised can robustly, rapidly, and quantitatively analyse these interactions for a range of systems, including those previously inaccessible to existing NMR methods.

The article is open access and can be read online here.