SARS-CoV-2 Variants vs Antibodies

This video, provided by Digital World Biology, is from a series of tutorial videos for iCn3D, a web-based three-dimensional visualization and structural analysis platform for molecular structures. During the video, presenter Sandra Porter discusses using iCn3D to predict whether an antibody will be able to bind to new SARS-CoV-2 variants found on Nextstrain.org, a real-time tool for tracking and comparing SARS-CoV-2 variants. Topics taught in the video include:

• How to find a protein sequence from a variant strain of SARS-CoV-2 using NextStrain.org and the NCBI
• How to use BLAST and iCn3D to align that sequence to the sequence of a spike protein in a molecular structure model
• How to identify and annotate the antibody binding site on a spike protein.
• How to identify positions in the spike protein where the variant sequence differs from the older sequence.
• How to use iCn3D to predict how a mutation in the variant sequence is likely to affect the chemical bonds between the antibody and the spike protein in the variant.

This video runs 24:04 minutes in length. Additional videos in the series are available to view separately.