Electrostatic Interaction between SARS-CoV-2 and Charged Surfaces: Spike Protein Evolution Changed the Game.

Electrostatic Interaction between SARS-CoV-2 and Charged Surfaces: Spike Protein Evolution Changed the Game.

Publication date: Dec 25, 2024

Previous works show the key role of electrostatics in the SARS-CoV-2 virus in aspects such as virus-cell interactions or virus inactivation by ionic surfactants. Electrostatic interactions depend strongly on the variant since the charge of the Spike protein (responsible for virus-environment interactions) evolved across the variants from the highly negative Wild Type (WT) to the highly positive Omicron variant. The distribution of the charge also evolved from diffuse to highly localized. These facts suggest that SARS-CoV-2 should interact strongly with charged surfaces in a way that changed during the virus evolution. This question is studied here by computing the electrostatic interaction between WT, Delta and Omicron Spike proteins with charged surfaces using a new method (based on Debye-HcFCckel theory) that provides efficiently general results as a function of the surface charge density σ. We found that the interaction of the WT and Delta variant spikes with charged surfaces is dominated by repulsive image forces proportional to σ originating at the protein/water interface. On the contrary, the Omicron variant shows a distinct behavior, being strongly attracted to negatively charged surfaces and repelled from positively charged ones. Therefore, the SARS-CoV-2 virus has evolved from being repelled by charged surfaces to being efficiently adsorbing to negatively charged ones.

Concepts Keywords
Evolution Changed
Proportional Charge
Protein Charged
Surfactants Cov
Virus Electrostatic
Evolution
Evolved
Interaction
Interactions
Omicron
Sars
Spike
Surfaces
Variant
Virus

Semantics

Type Source Name
disease IDO protein
disease IDO role
disease IDO cell
drug DRUGBANK Water

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