Structural analysis of SARS-CoV-2 and prediction of the human interactome

Andrea Vandelli; Michele Monti; Edoardo Milanetti; Riccardo Delli Ponti; Gian Gaetano Tartaglia

The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.28.013789 doi: bioRxiv preprint is highly variable 32 , as indicated by T-coffee multiple sequence alignments 32 (Fig. 3A) . This part of 171 the spike S region corresponds to amino acids 243-302 that in MERS-CoV binds to sialic acids 172 regulating infection through cell-cell membrane fusion ( Fig. 3B Our analysis suggests that the structural region between nucleotides 23000 and 24000 of Spike S 176 region is conserved among coronaviruses (Fig. 2) and that the binding site for ACE2 has poor 177 variation in human SARS-CoV-2 strains (Fig. 3B) . By contrast, the region upstream, which has 178 propensity to bind sialic acids 10,33,34 , showed poor structural content and high variability (Fig. 3B) . 179 180