Researchers at UCLA have identified a coronavirus protein that appears to do two opposite things at once: quiet the body's earliest antiviral alarm while cranking up the inflammatory machinery that causes tissue damage later.
The protein is nucleocapsid, a structural protein that packages and protects the virus's genetic material and that has drawn far less attention than spike. In laboratory work published in Science Advances, a team led by Melody Li, an associate professor of microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics at UCLA, found that nucleocapsid amplified inflammatory pathways inside macrophages, the immune cells that patrol tissue and coordinate early defense.
