Amazing work, and it would be gratifying to see Doudna bag another Nobel prize, to be awarded in a year when the celebrations aren't markedly subdued by rampant

Amazing work, and it would be gratifying to see Doudna bag another Nobel prize, to be awarded in a year when the celebrations aren't markedly subdued by rampant disease. As important as the posted story demonstrates the N protein to be, it's probably not a good idea to direct a vaccine towards it without a much deeper understanding of the consequences. Derek Lowe's wonderful column in the same magazine touched that point earlier this year, in https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/antibody-dependent-enhancement-and-coronavirus-vaccines https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/antibody-dependent... See the last paragraph under the subheading "ADE and Coronaviruses" for a very brief account of candidate vaccines (against the closely related SARS-CoV) which included the N protein tending to make the disease worse. For those who have already read that story, but not recently, you may want to check back on it, because I see now that Derek has added an update and more references: "There was trouble after immunization with a nucleoprotein-directed vaccine, but ADE could also be seen with some of the Spike-directed vaccine candidates as well - see reviews here, here, and here." Not sure exactly what you, zmmmmm, mean by a "compromised" spike protein, but if it's something like one that is not well neutralized by antibodies raised against epitopes from the early generations of SARS-CoV-2, this post recently would be relevant https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29004006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29004006