Watch Dr Spyros Lytras discuss the findings of his most recent publication in PLOS Biology.

Previous research from the CVR found that having a specific form of the OAS1 protein leads to less severe disease in humans. The horseshoe bat version of this protein, however, lost its antiviral properties 60 million years ago. Spyros and colleagues used ancestral sequence reconstruction to predict and resurrect this ancient bat protein and showed that it blocks SARS-CoV-2 replication.

This highlights the importance of taking a One Health approach to virus research.

🔗 Links

Read the paper here: https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002398

Follow Spyros on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SpyrosLytras