{"doi":"10.3390/v12090909","title":"The Sialoside-Binding Pocket of SARS-CoV-2 Spike Glycoprotein Structurally Resembles MERS-CoV","abstract":"COVID-19 novel coronavirus (CoV) disease caused by severe acquired respiratory syndrome (SARS)-CoV-2 manifests severe lethal respiratory illness in humans and has recently developed into a worldwide pandemic. The lack of effective treatment strategy and vaccines against the SARS-CoV-2 poses a threat to human health. An extremely high infection rate and multi-organ secondary infection within a short period of time makes this virus more deadly and challenging for therapeutic interventions. Despite high sequence similarity and utilization of common host-cell receptor, human angiotensin-converting enzyme-2 (ACE2) for virus entry, SARS-CoV-2 is much more infectious than SARS-CoV. Structure-based sequence comparison of the N-terminal domain (NTD) of the spike protein of Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS)-CoV, SARS-CoV, and SARS-CoV-2 illustrate three divergent loop regions in SARS-CoV-2, which is reminiscent of MERS-CoV sialoside binding pockets. Comparative binding analysis with host sialosides revealed conformational flexibility of SARS-CoV-2 divergent loop regions to accommodate diverse glycan-rich sialosides. These key differences with SARS-CoV and similarity with MERS-CoV suggest an evolutionary adaptation of SARS-CoV-2 spike glycoprotein reciprocal interaction with host surface sialosides to infect host cells with wide tissue tropism.","journal":"Viruses","year":2020,"id":58165,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":74,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9574,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2020-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":304652,"name":"Sahil Gulati","orcid":"0000-0002-8255-479X","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":304653,"name":"Debi P. Sarkar","orcid":"0000-0002-8886-8415","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":304654,"name":"Swasti Tiwari","orcid":"0000-0002-1701-2636","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":304655,"name":"Suneel Kateriya","orcid":"0000-0001-5428-4297","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":304656,"name":"Peeyush Ranjan","orcid":"0000-0001-6823-2033","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":304657,"name":"Santosh Kumar Verma","orcid":"0000-0001-6058-6494","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":304651,"name":"Mayanka Awasthi","orcid":"0000-0002-4395-0589","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":44,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T21:07:11.345501Z","pmid":"32825063","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}