The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted almost every aspect of our lives in the past year and continues to do so. In March, at the one-year mark of the World Health Organization declaration that COVID-19 is a pandemic, researchers at HWI – Drs. Miranda Lynch, Edward Snell and Sarah Bowman – delved into the role structural biology has played in the fight against COVID-19.
The results were illuminating and were published in IUCrJ entitled Structural biology in the time of COVID-19: perspectives on methods and milestones. The paper highlights the amazing work done by the structural biology community on SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The synergy between X-ray crystallography, cryo-electron microscopy, and computational methods has led to critical advances indispensable to developing treatments for infection and vaccines for prevention.