Casting a Wide Net to Fight Coronaviruses

Scientists fear that vaccines may prove ineffectual against coronaviruses because the viruses, like HIV, change their protein sequences and structures so often that a vaccine targeting one strain would likely be ineffective against another. The success of such a vaccine strategy depends on finding a protein target that is present, or well conserved, among all the different coronaviruses. By combining structural and biochemical analyses, Yang et al. not only identified such a target in a conserved region of a viral enzyme but also designed compounds with antiviral activity against multiple coronaviruses.