Paul Whitford

While little can be done about the presence of glycans, revealing their significance in the spike’s mechanism could offer previously unknown opportunities to protect against COVID-19, says co-principal investigator Paul Whitford, an associate professor at Northeastern University and senior scientist at CTBP.

Cellular function requires biomolecules to undergo dynamic transitions that include folding, conformational rearrangements, and large-scale assembly. The result is a highly interdependent network of processes that is maintained by a balance of thermodynamic and kinetic factors. In molecular machines, each constituent biopolymer (i.e., a chain of residues) first folds to a low energy configuration/ensemble. These ordered polymers can then assemble into sophisticated architectures, […]