Contributions from Structural Biology to the Pandemic Response During the SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic: Lessons Learned for the Future

Structural biologyStructural biology—the scientific area devoted to understanding the three-dimensional architecture of biological molecules—became a lynchpin in the effort to combat the SARS-CoV-2SARS-CoV-2virusVirus from the very inception of the pandemic. Determining the structures of key components of the virusVirus, and how those components work together to execute the viral life cycle, began literally as soon as we had the initial gene sequences from patient samples in the first weeks after the virusVirus was identified; the first sequence was made available online on January 10, 2020 (VirologicalWebsite, https://virological.org/t/novel-2019-coronavirus-genome/319; Wu et al. Nature 579:265–269, 2020a). The structures fueled the development of both vaccines and therapeutics, and helped unravel details of how the virusVirus infected hosts and spread. This chapter highlights two NSF-funded RAPID projects, one experimental and one computational, focused on structural biologyStructural biology. The first project set up resources to accelerate structure discovery by enabling rapid screening for crystallizationCrystallization. The second project used computational tools to model the interaction of proteins from the virusVirus with those from the host. Both projects are placed within the larger context of the contributions of the field of structural biologyStructural biology to the fights against COVID-19COVID-19, and underscore the role that structural biologyStructural biology plays in our ability to address emerging pandemic threats.