Maria Giulia Bigotti, Katja Klein, Esther S Gan, Maria Anastasina, Simon Andersson, Olli Vapalahti, Pekka Katajisto, Maximilian Erdmann, Andrew D Davidson, Sarah J Butcher, Ian Collinson, Eng Eong Ooi, Giuseppe Balistreri, Andrea Brancaccio, Yohei Yamauchi
The COVID-19 pandemic has shown the need to develop effective therapeutics in preparedness for further epidemics of virus infections that pose a significant threat to human health. As a natural compound antiviral candidate, we focused on α-dystroglycan, a highly glycosylated basement membrane protein that links the extracellular matrix to the intracellular cytoskeleton. Here we show that the N-terminal fragment of α-dystroglycan (α-DGN), as produced in E. coli in the absence of post-translational modifications, blocks infection of SARS-CoV-2 in cell culture, human primary gut organoids and the lungs of transgenic mice expressing the human receptor angiotensin I-converting enzyme 2 (hACE2)...
February 20, 2024: Antiviral Research