Since the start of the pandemic, scientists have documented a “spectrum” of potential heart effects of SARS-CoV-2. Now, a team at the University of Maryland School of Medicine has found a specific virus protein can damage the heart—at least in flies and mice.
When a virus enters a host cell, it induces that cell to create specific viral proteins. The SARS-CoV-2 virus contains the genetic information for 29 different proteins, and in a paper published in Communications Biology in September, researchers determined that one of those proteins, Nsp6, supercharges energy usage in heart cells in a way that may cause heart damage.
The researchers first selected 12 of SARS-CoV-2’s proteins with the highest likelihood of instigating a pathogenic response in host cells, as identified by a computational method that predicted their function based on structure. The team then engineered 12 separate lines of fruit flies to each express one of ...
