The glycan gate opens: Supercomputing-driven simulations depict the glycan N343 (magenta) acting as a molecular crowbar to pry open the SARS-CoV-2 spike’s receptor binding domain, or RBD (cyan), from a “down” to an "up" position.
Credit: Terra Sztain, Surl-Hee Ahn, Lorenzo Casalino (Amaro Lab, UC San Diego).
Creationist mode: 
Scientist from UC San Diego, University of Pittsburgh, University of Texas at Austin, Columbia University and University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee have discovered how Creationism's beloved malevolence designed the nasty little SARS-CoV-2 virus to sneak past our defences, enter the cells lining our respiratory tract and either kill us, or make us very sick while producing lots of new virus particles with which to infect others.
In this way, it brilliantly produced the coronavirus pandemic currently wrecking economies and killing people by the tens of thousands a day and leaving very many more with long-term health problems. This same malevolence also allegedly designed our inadequate defences to protect us from the parasites, such as this virus, it creates to harm us! <sarcasm>Obviously, such a designer is worthy of our admiration and adoration and provides the role model for our social ethics.</sarcasm>.
Creationist mode: 
Meanwhile back in reality:
The discovery was made using a super-computer to simulate how the virus behaves when it attaches to the ACE2 receptor sites on the surface of the cells lining your respiratory tract. The virus does this by fooling your cells which regard the glycans as harmless sugars (sneaky, eh?). The super-computer simulations enabled the scientists to visualise for the first time, just how this gate opens.
We essentially figured out how the spike actually opens and infects. We’ve unlocked an important secret of the spike in how it infects cells. Without this gate the virus basically is rendered incapable of infection.
We were actually able to watch the opening and closing. That’s one of the really cool things these simulations give you—the ability to see really detailed movies. When you watch them you realize you’re seeing something that we otherwise would have ignored. You look at just the closed structure, and then you look at the open structure, and it doesn’t look like anything special. It’s only because we captured the movie of the whole process that you actually see it doing its thing.
The scientists have discovered that the virus has a sugary residue, known as glycans, around the base of its spike proteins, that acts as a molecular 'crowbar' to leaver open a gateway into the cell, through which the virus can inject its RNA. This gate can exist in two states - open or closed.We were actually able to watch the opening and closing. That’s one of the really cool things these simulations give you—the ability to see really detailed movies. When you watch them you realize you’re seeing something that we otherwise would have ignored. You look at just the closed structure, and then you look at the open structure, and it doesn’t look like anything special. It’s only because we captured the movie of the whole process that you actually see it doing its thing.
Rommie E. Amaro, co-senior author
Professor of chemistry and biochemistry
Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
University of California San Diego, La Jolla, California, USA
Professor of chemistry and biochemistry
Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
University of California San Diego, La Jolla, California, USA
This means if a pharmacological way could be found to keep it closed, the virus would be rendered incapable of infecting cells and so prevented from doing the damage it does and making more copies of itself.
From the UC San Diego news release:
The computationally intensive simulations were first run on Comet at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego and later on Longhorn at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at UT Austin. Such computing power provided the researchers with atomic-The team's findings are published in Nature Chemistry, sadly behind a paywall. However, their abstract can be read here.We showed that without this gate, the RBD of the spike protein can’t take the conformation it needs to infect cells.level views of the spike protein receptor binding domain, or RBD, from more than 300 perspectives. The investigations revealed glycan “N343” as the linchpin that pries the RBD from the “down” to “up” position to allow access to the host cell’s ACE2 receptor. The researchers describe N343 glycan activation as similar to a “molecular crowbar” mechanism.
Jason McLellan, Co-author Associate professor of molecular bioscience
Department of Molecular Biosciences
The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, USA
Jason McLellan, an associate professor of molecular biosciences at UT Austin and his team created variants of the spike protein and tested to see how a lack of the glycan gate affected the RBD’s ability to open.
Someday soon, the creationist frauds at the Deception Institute are going to need to bite the bullet and deal with the issue of the grotesque nature of this hideous malevolence they insist is behind things like the SARS-CoV-2 virus. If any good can come from the coronavirus pandemic if can only be to open the eyes of people to the absurdity of Creationism and its claim to be defendign and promoting the god of the Bible or Qur'an.
Even if we accept for the sake of argument, their assertion that there must be a supreme intelligence behind the apparent design of things because they can't understand how natural forces can produce the superficial semblance of design, there is no way it can be reconciled with the supposed god of love Christians like to pretend the Bible is all about. Continually designer ever-more inventive ways to make us sick is simply not a loving act and nor is it the act of an intelligent designer to design a defensive system like our immune system ,then treat that as a problem to be overcome with the design of the parasites it creates to make us sick.
The entire religious fundamentalist nonsense of intelligent design creationism is completely at odds with logic and, as Francis Collins pointed out in The Language of God those who push creationist nonsense are bankrupt both in their science and in their theology, and as such, do immeasurable harm to both.
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