Miotto Mattia, Di Rienzo Lorenzo, Gosti Giorgio, Bo' Leonardo, Parisi Giacomo, Piacentini Roberta, Boffi Alberto, Ruocco Giancarlo, Milanetti Edoardo
Center for Life Nano & Neuroscience, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Viale Regina Elena 291, 00161, Rome, Italy.
Department of Biochemical Sciences "Alessandro Rossi Fanelli", Sapienza University of Rome, P.Le A. Moro 5, 00185, Rome, Italy.
Commun Biol. 2022 Jan 6;5(1):20221. doi: 10.1038/s42003-021-02946-w.
As the SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2) pandemic continues to spread, several variants of the virus, with mutations distributed all over the viral genome, are emerging. While most of the variants present mutations having little to no effects at the phenotypic level, some of these variants are spreading at a rate that suggests they may present a selective advantage. In particular, these rapidly spreading variants present specific mutations on the spike protein. These observations call for an urgent need to characterize the effects of these variants' mutations on phenotype features like contagiousness and antigenicity. With this aim, we performed molecular dynamics simulations on a selected set of possible spike variants in order to assess the stabilizing effect of particular amino acid substitutions on the molecular complex. We specifically focused on the mutations that are both characteristic of the top three most worrying variants at the moment, i.e the English, South African, and Amazonian ones, and that occur at the molecular interface between SARS-CoV-2 spike protein and its human ACE2 receptor. We characterize these variants' effect in terms of (i) residue mobility, (ii) compactness, studying the network of interactions at the interface, and (iii) variation of shape complementarity via expanding the molecular surfaces in the Zernike basis. Overall, our analyses highlighted greater stability of the three variant complexes with respect to both the wild type and two negative control systems, especially for the English and Amazonian variants. In addition, in the three variants, we investigate the effects a not-yet observed mutation in position 501 could provoke on complex stability. We found that a phenylalanine mutation behaves similarly to the English variant and may cooperate in further increasing the stability of the South African one, hinting at the need for careful surveillance for the emergence of these mutations in the population. Ultimately, we show that the proposed observables describe key features for the stability of the ACE2-spike complex and can help to monitor further possible spike variants.
随着严重急性呼吸综合征冠状病毒2(SARS-CoV-2)大流行的持续蔓延,该病毒的几种变体不断出现,其突变分布在整个病毒基因组中。虽然大多数变体的突变在表型水平上几乎没有影响,但其中一些变体的传播速度表明它们可能具有选择性优势。特别是,这些快速传播的变体在刺突蛋白上存在特定突变。这些观察结果迫切需要表征这些变体突变对传染性和抗原性等表型特征的影响。为此,我们对一组选定的可能的刺突变体进行了分子动力学模拟,以评估特定氨基酸取代对分子复合物的稳定作用。我们特别关注目前最令人担忧的三种变体(即英国变体、南非变体和亚马逊变体)所特有的突变,这些突变发生在SARS-CoV-2刺突蛋白与其人类血管紧张素转换酶2(ACE2)受体之间的分子界面上。我们从以下几个方面表征这些变体的影响:(i)残基流动性;(ii)紧密性,研究界面处的相互作用网络;(iii)通过在泽尼克基中扩展分子表面来研究形状互补性的变化。总体而言,我们的分析突出了这三种变体复合物相对于野生型和两个阴性对照系统具有更高的稳定性,特别是对于英国变体和亚马逊变体。此外,在这三种变体中,我们研究了5'01位置尚未观察到的突变对复合物稳定性可能产生的影响。我们发现苯丙氨酸突变的行为与英国变体相似,可能会协同进一步提高南非变体的稳定性,这暗示需要密切监测人群中这些突变的出现。最终,我们表明所提出的可观测指标描述了ACE2-刺突复合物稳定性的关键特征,并有助于监测进一步可能出现的刺突变体。