Making our cells unrecognizable to the coronavirus

Western’s campus has been closed for months, the greenspaces empty and corridors eerily silent. The catalyst for this radical change was COVID-19. “This pandemic is awe-inspiring. It has brought to a halt everything that was familiar to us. My graduate students and I asked ourselves what we could do to make a difference in this new and frightening context, says Martin Stillman of the Department of Chemistry. Deep within the Chemistry Building, Stillman and his research group toiled away on a series of experiments essential to understanding this silent killer. “Almost everyone has seen a depiction of the coronavirus by now: a ball covered in spikes,” says Stillman. “Those spikes are what allows the virus to attach to our own cells and may hold the key to understanding how it attacks both young and old, but in different ways.” -Martin Stillman….

https://www.uwo.ca/sci/research/articles/2020/making_our_cells_unrecognizable_to_the_coronavirus.html