New Insights Into How SARS-CoV-2 Uses Host Cells to Enhance Infectiveness

SARS-CoV-2 is a highly infectious virus that has caused the COVID-19 pandemic. Researchers have now had several years to study this virus, and several new reports have outlined the many ways that the virus can efficiently infect cells, and even boost its own infectiveness with host cell proteins.

In one study reported in Nature Communications, scientists found that the virus uses a host cell enzyme to make a modification to the viral spike protein, which is required for the virus to infect cells. This modification is made by the enzyme ZDHHC20, which…