Washington State University researchers have found a way to block herpes viruses from entering cells — by changing a single amino acid in the protein viruses use to break in.
The discovery came from an unlikely partnership: AI and wet-lab biology working in tandem. Scientists have long understood that herpes viruses rely on a "fusion" protein to attach to cells and merge with them, triggering infection. But the protein is large and complex, constantly shifting shape in ways researchers couldn't fully map. That knowledge gap is partly why vaccines for common herpes viruses have remained out of reach.
Finding the Needle in the Molecular Haystack
Prashanta Dutta and Jin Liu, computational professors at WSU, approached the problem differently. Rather than testing thousands of possible interactions one by one in a lab — a process that could take months per interaction — they used machine learning to simulate thousands of molecular interactions at once. Their algorithm sorted through the data, identifying which amino acid interactions actually mattered for viral entry.
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Start Your News DetoxThe payoff was immediate. They pinpointed a single amino acid that plays a central role in how the fusion protein works.
Anthony Nicola's lab team then tested the computational prediction in living cells. When they altered that one amino acid, the herpes virus could no longer fuse with cells. Infection stopped.
"If we don't do the simulation and instead did this work by trial and error, it could have taken years to find," Liu said. "The combination of theoretical computational work with the experiments is so efficient."
This isn't just about one virus or one protein. The method — using AI to narrow down which molecular interactions matter most, then testing the most promising candidates in the lab — could accelerate how researchers approach other viral proteins that have resisted traditional vaccine development.
The team isn't done. They're now investigating how that single amino acid change ripples through the entire structure of the fusion protein at larger scales. Understanding those downstream effects could reveal even more ways to disrupt viral entry. The work was funded by the National Institutes of Health and included PhD students Ryan Odstrcil, Albina Makio, and McKenna Hull.
