Since the novel SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus changed everyone’s lives in March 2020, an extraordinary amount of time and effort has gone into understanding and characterizing this virus. In particular, researchers have been investigating its molecular structure, looking for chinks in its armor that might be exploited to weaken its ability to infect and sicken. A group at the University of Bristol in the UK might have found one of those vulnerabilities: a conserved pocket in the spike protein of the virus that binds a specific fatty acid.

Join this conversation with Dr. Imre Berger as he explains how this potentially important discovery was made, the challenges they overcame in analyzing the masses of cryo-EM data generated, and how they’re moving this discovery into clinical application.