Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 288

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 40 of the 40 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Structure of coronavirus hemagglutinin-esterase offers insight into corona and influenza virus evolution

Open access
Zeng, Qinghong, Langereis, Martijn A., van Vliet, Arno L. W., Huizinga, Eric G., de Groot, Raoul J.·2008·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
DOI 10.1073/pnas.0800502105
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

The hemagglutinin-esterases (HEs) are a family of viral envelope glycoproteins that mediate reversible attachment to O -acetylated sialic acids by acting both as lectins and as receptor-destroying enzymes (RDEs). Related HEs occur in influenza C, toro-, and coronaviruses, apparently as a result of relatively recent lateral gene transfer events. Here, we report the crystal structure of a coronavirus (CoV) HE in complex with its receptor. We show that CoV HE arose from an influenza C-like HE fusion protein (HEF). In the process, HE was transformed from a trimer into a dimer, whereas remnants of the fusion domain were adapted to establish novel monomer–monomer contacts. Whereas the structural design of the RDE-acetylesterase domain remained unaltered, the HE receptor-binding domain underwent remodeling to such extent that the ligand is now bound in opposite orientation. This is surprising, because the architecture of the HEF site was preserved in influenza A HA over a much larger evolutionary distance, a switch in receptor specificity and extensive antigenic variation notwithstanding. Apparently, HA and HEF are under more stringent selective constraints than HE, limiting their exploration of alternative binding-site topologies. We attribute the plasticity of the CoV HE receptor-binding site to evolutionary flexibility conferred by functional redundancy between HE and its companion spike protein S. Our findings offer unique insights into the structural and functional consequences of independent protein evolution after interviral gene exchange and open potential avenues to broad-spectrum antiviral drug design.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1073/pnas.0800502105

Cites

40 of 40 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 40 references

Cited by

See all 288

Metadata

Authors
Zeng, Q., Langereis, M. A., van Vliet, A. L. W., Huizinga, E. G., & de Groot, R. J.
Venue
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Publisher
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Published
2008-07
Volume
105
Issue
26
Pages
9065-9069
ISSN
  • 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
  • 1091-6490
DOI
10.1073/pnas.0800502105
OpenAlex
W2141504923
Cited by
288
References
40
FWCI
5.21
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
bronze

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Structure of coronavirus hemagglutinin-esterase offers insight into corona and influenza virus evolution. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1073/pnas.0800502105
The paper
Zeng, Q., Langereis, M. A., van Vliet, A. L. W., Huizinga, E. G., & de Groot, R. J. (2008). Structure of coronavirus hemagglutinin-esterase offers insight into corona and influenza virus evolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0800502105

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.