How to Use spike protein in a Sentence

spike protein

noun
Definition of spike proteinnext
  • The changes that lead to new variants tend to occur in the spike protein.
    — Theresa Tamkins, NBC News, 10 Sep. 2023
  • The spike protein allows the virus to enter healthy cells— the first step to infection.
    — Kaitlin Sullivan, Health, 29 Sep. 2023
  • The vaccines will also likely still be able to target the parts of the spike protein that have remained the same.
    — Claire Bugos, Verywell Health, 31 Aug. 2023
  • Immune cells in the arm muscle recognize the spike protein as foreign and sound the alarm.
    — Emily Mullin, WIRED, 22 Jan. 2024
  • Those spike proteins attach to your healthy cells to replicate and cause illness.
    — Claire Gillespie, Health, 11 Sep. 2023
  • Other variants that have emerged since Omicron (like Eris) have not changed the virus's spike protein.
    — Olivia Evans, Women's Health, 29 Aug. 2023
  • Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the virus has acquired new mutations in its spike protein and elsewhere.
    — Emily Mullin, WIRED, 12 Sep. 2023
  • The spike protein is a key outer protein the virus uses to enter human cells.
    — Eric Berger, Ars Technica, 4 Oct. 2023
  • The spike protein helps the virus latch onto cells and is the target of the vaccines developed by Moderna and Pfizer.
    — Madison Muller, Anchorage Daily News, 19 Aug. 2023
  • Those that contain lots of spike proteins, which attach to human cells and start the process of getting the virus into the cells, are also more likely to spread.
    — Dr. Keith Roach, oregonlive, 7 Mar. 2023
  • But the structure of these spike proteins can change as the virus evolves, causing vaccines to become less effective against new variants of the virus.
    — Hiawatha Bray, BostonGlobe.com, 9 Mar. 2023
  • This hybrid contained the spike protein gene of the Omicron variant inserted into the genome of the original Wuhan strain of the virus.
    — Dave Wessner, Forbes, 9 Mar. 2023
  • Cells then use those instructions to produce the spike protein as if they had been infected by the real virus.
    — Yasemin Saplakoglu, Quanta Magazine, 2 Oct. 2023
  • Next, an electrical current passes through the sensor, which leads the virus’s spike protein to lose electrons.
    — Margaret Osborne, Smithsonian Magazine, 18 July 2023
  • Those cells could potentially be killed by the immune reaction to the spike protein.
    — Scientific American, 17 Apr. 2023
  • When the team engineered neurons to express the spike protein, only cells that also expressed ACE2 were able to fuse with each other.
    — Byclaudia Lopez Lloreda, science.org, 7 June 2023
  • The name refers to amino acids involved in two new mutations on the virus’s spike protein: phenylalanine (F), leucine (L), arginine (R) and threonine (T).
    — Lauren J. Young, Scientific American, 5 June 2024
  • This spike protein is what’s targeted by vaccines—this allows the shot to lower the chance of infection or severe illness from the disease.
    — Kaitlin Sullivan, Health, 29 Sep. 2023
  • The three variants do not differ much in their spike protein, which is the target of the vaccines, so a vaccine targeting any should be effective against all three, experts told the panel.
    — Karen Weintraub, USA TODAY, 16 June 2023
  • But the study was conducted in vitro, not in the body, and looked only at those spike proteins from an infection, not an mRNA vaccination.
    — Joedy McCreary, USA TODAY, 21 July 2023
  • The nasal vaccine also previews the entire coronavirus for the body, not just its spike proteins like current Covid-19 vaccines do, so the hamsters were able to make immune weapons against a wider range of targets.
    — Brenda Goodman, CNN, 3 Apr. 2023
  • The vaccine uses a type of parainfluenza virus encoded with the coronavirus’s spike protein to train the immune system to recognize and fight it.
    — Denise Chow, NBC News, 24 Feb. 2023
  • What makes most of the newer variants different is mutations in the spike protein, which is what the virus uses to enter and infect cells, Binnicker explained.
    — Mary Kekatos, ABC News, 7 Sep. 2023
  • This particular variant has four new mutations, including three in the spike protein, which is what the virus uses to latch onto your cells and infect you.
    — Korin Miller, Verywell Health, 8 May 2024
  • That's compared to the tens of thousands of research articles she's pulled up on the coronavirus spike protein, which has been the focus of vaccines and efforts to understand how the virus enters and infects our cells.
    — Ari Daniel, NPR, 26 Mar. 2024
  • The spike protein is located on the virus’s surface and facilitates its entry into human cells.
    — Amber Sayer, Health, 13 June 2024
  • Seemingly, the spike protein in infected cells may also make other ACE2 on a cell trigger fusion to a neighboring cell.
    — Byclaudia Lopez Lloreda, science.org, 7 June 2023
  • Vaccines using the mRNA technology contain the genetic code for the virus’ spike protein, and this code instructs certain cells in the human body to make this viral protein and then present it to the immune system.
    — Alice Park, Time, 26 Sep. 2023
  • Home tests usually target a protein called the nucleocapsid protein (N protein) or the spike protein, which can latch onto cells.
    — Korin Miller, Verywell Health, 29 Nov. 2023
  • But additional mutations in the virus’s spike protein, which attaches to and infects human cells, has the potential to make the variant more infectious and even cause more severe disease.
    — Erin Prater, Fortune Well, 31 Mar. 2023

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'spike protein.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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