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Gael McGill (138 Fuller Street, apt #1)
The SARS CoV-2 pandemic has been a rallying cry for the scientific community and we have witnessed an outpouring of research about the virus over the past year. The incredible collaborative effort on the part of the scientific/medical visualization community has paralleled this trend and numerous high-quality models, images and animations have been created to help explain the biology of the virus and, in particular, the spike protein. However, few studies (and visualizations based on them) have captured the daunting complexity of the spike’s motions as it drives infection. In this poster we will share our efforts to accurately model, simulate and visualize the spike-induced membrane fusion process. Our work reveals not only how this molecular contortionist transitions from prefusion, to prehairpin and postfusion intermediates during membrane fusion, but also offers new insights about the timing of protease cleavage and why inactivated virus may prove to be a poor choice of vaccine immunogen. Finally we share our collaborative work (recently published in Science) visualizing the mechanism of action of a promising class of fusion inhibitors.