According to the news from Wuhan University, Professor Yan Huan's team from the School of Life Sciences, the State Key Laboratory of Virology and Taikang Life Medical Center of the university, together with Shi Zhengli's team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences Wuhan Institute of Virology and researchers from the University of Washington, put forward a new idea of virus research through research, which is expected to build a susceptible cell model without relying on natural receptors, and further help the development of vaccines and antiviral drugs. The relevant research results were recently published in the international academic journal Nature. The corresponding author of the paper, Yan Huan, introduced that receptor recognition is a key event in the process of viral infection and transmission. The receptor molecules on cells are not only the core clues for understanding the mechanism of virus invasion, but also the basis for constructing infection models, promoting research on the pathogenic mechanism of virus infection, and drug development. However, there is a high degree of uncertainty and lag in the identification of natural receptors, and the identification of receptors for some important viruses has not been breakthrough for decades, which seriously hinders the in-depth advancement of related virological research. In the face of this challenge, the research team has taken a different approach and proposed a new idea of "artificially designing virus receptors", adopting a modular design approach similar to "Lego bricks". The complete receptor is decomposed into two parts, the "virus binding domain" and the "artificial receptor framework", which are designed and optimized separately. Finally, customized virus receptors are obtained through molecular grafting. Yan Huan introduced that in the specific research, the team took COVID-19 as the research model, deeply analyzed the key factors affecting the function of receptors, developed a set of modular design scheme of artificial receptors suitable for coronavirus, and further revealed the molecular mechanism of the function of human receptors through structural biology. Using artificial receptor technology, the team designed functional artificial receptors for 12 coronaviruses from 6 different subgenera, and successfully isolated and cultured coronaviruses such as HKU5 using a customized virus receptor based infection model. Yan Huan stated that research has shown that the new approach of "artificially designing virus receptors" has significant scientific and practical value. By designing artificial receptors for viruses with unknown receptors and lacking infection models, it is expected to break through the bottleneck of virology research, promote basic research on the pathogenesis of related viral infections, and develop vaccines and antiviral drugs. (New Society)