No doubt you’ve seen the cartoon depiction of the novel coronavirus: A big ball, usually red, with numerous projections sporting what seem like suction cups on their ends.
Like one of those toy balls you can throw it at a wall and it sticks there.I don’t know if this is at all an accurate representation of the virus, but maybe that doesn’t matter.
What we do know is that the projections stand for so-called “spike proteins", and it is these proteins through which the virus attacks and invades other cells.
In a sense, they are the weapons that the virus carries to war, wielding them as it moves through its surroundings in search of vulnerabilites to exploit, thus people to infect.
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