Advances in glycoscience to understand viral infection and colonization.

Interactions between carbohydrates and the proteins that bind them (lectins) are often some of the first between a host cell and a viral invader. With its highly glycosylated spike protein, SARS-CoV-2 is no exception. Interrogating glycosylation is vital to understand viral infection, yet it has been a challenge. Improvement in methods ranging from mass spectrometry to glycan arrays and modeling simulations are yielding atomic-level information about the glycans that decorate viruses and host cells alike.