Talk:Spike protein

Quality
So is the term peplomer to be considered current terminology or not? If it is not, then that fact should be mentioned early, not after (pointlessly) describing specific usage. Also, if it is not currently used, what are the current terms? This is a technical term, for which we are reading the definition precisely because someone (on another page) used it. We then read the definition and examples of its usage, and are then told we should not use it. Unfortunately, we are unable to comply with this helpful suggestion, due to the lack of an approved term! Aboctok (talk) 20:18, 30 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I just searched a few databases and came up with several recent-year hits for the term. It's still in use. Bob the WikipediaN (talk • contribs) 15:48, 30 March 2011 (UTC)
 * Well, you did not give LINKS, so your claim is useless. I have never before heard the term peplomer in classical virology. We all call the viral glykoproteins vp. But in veterinary medicine, they seem to use the word 'peplomer', which I have no idea for why especially the veterinary medicine affiliados use that word! 80.121.41.72 (talk) 23:27, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
 * I think we should systematically search for the origin of the word itself, which textbook about virology mentions it. 84.113.184.113 (talk) 09:37, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

Origin of the term
Can we get a history of the term? Peplo is a peculiar word, mer is more common (oligomer). And when it was used last. 84.113.184.113 (talk) 09:37, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

Uniqueness?
Some of the Covid-19 vaccines target the Spike protein, how specific is this to the Virus? Is it shared by other symbiotic, pathogenic and beneficial viri? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 5.80.214.173 (talk) 18:26, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

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Requested move 16 June 2021

 * The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion. 

The result of the move request was: moved. (closed by non-admin page mover) Lennart97 (talk) 10:03, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

Peplomer → Spike protein – The article points this out (without a citation), but this really isn't the most common term in current use. Even limiting searches to 2018 or before, to exclude the flood of covid-related papers, Google Scholar gives 17,400 hits for the phrase "spike protein", compared to 2470 for peplomer, mostly older papers. Of course, if this really were the current common term for the proteins in question, the past year should have produced hundreds of peplomer papers, but there's only 4. Similarly, see the use-by-year graphs in pubmed for peplomer and "spike protein". And the overwhelming majority of related media coverage on topics like SARS-CoV-2 variants, vaccines, antigens, etc, has used "spike", making it the common name outside the scientific literature as well. Opabinia regalis (talk) 06:38, 16 June 2021 (UTC) The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
 * Support per nom and WP:COMMONNAME. Crossover1370  (talk &#124; contribs) 21:44, 16 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Support move with appropriate rewording throughout the article. Velayinosu (talk) 01:16, 20 June 2021 (UTC)

The claim of no cytotoxicity of the vaccines is false
Adenovirus always has low level toxicity as do  Solid lipid nanoparticles. The Reuters article has a straw man argument. It exchanges claims of cytotoxicity with claims about organ toxicity and general toxicity. Specifically to answer well established cytotoxicity (see prior links) it cites an article on organ toxicity and the opinions of 2 public health scientists. No they are not experts on cytotoxicity, the effects of RNA overexpression, foreign lipid incorporation etc. Every fact checker seems to interchange toxicity and cytoxicity (https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/jun/16/youtube-videos/no-sign-covid-19-vaccines-spike-protein-toxic-or-c/) alot of disinformation. Honest propaganda would leave it at its not toxic to organs and ignore the cytotoxicity for now. An honest encyclopedia would discuss both. Best to just erase the article about spike proteins and society because its about nonspecialists criticizing specialists.68.134.68.237 (talk) 18:58, 5 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Nice rewrite posted. 68.134.68.237 (talk) 19:26, 5 August 2021 (UTC)

Scope
This article has been reformulated to solely refer to the spike proteins found on coronaviruses, however, as far as I can tell by reading pre 2020 literature on scholar, spike proteins are a broader concept that applies to all enveloped RNA viruses. In particular I see a lot of discussion surrounding the influenza virus. This really needs discussion. Hemiauchenia (talk) 02:57, 16 August 2021 (UTC)
 * All pre 2020 papers mentioning coronavirus spike proteins have gotten massive recent citation spikes due to the pandemic, which distorts the actual use in the literature, which shows that "spike protein" is actually used for a wide variety of viruses. Hemiauchenia (talk) 03:03, 16 August 2021 (UTC)
 * I have moved Opabinia Regalis's text over into the new article Spike protein (coronavirus). I have no objections to the text other than it doesn't cover the whole scope of the topic. Hemiauchenia (talk) 03:08, 16 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Oh, definitely not all enveloped viruses, but there are other spikes, like your example of influenza hemagglutinin (also a class I fusion protein). Even the original 1968 proposal to create the coronavirus group specifically distinguishes them from myxoviruses. I was planning to go the other way, with either a subsection here or a separate article on the general topic, but the nomenclature is a bit messy. The term "peplomer" to refer generally to projections from the viral surface had gone out of fashion long before COVID, but I haven't yet found a reference that discusses that change, rather than just using it. And while there are references to hemagglutinin as a spike, and to spikes belonging to other viral groups, even pre-COVID the term "spike protein" generally referred to coronaviruses. I think the gist is that coronavirus spike protein is a spike protein, called "spike protein". (Coronavirus protein names are a headache in general. There's (at least) three membrane proteins in the virion, only one of which is called "membrane protein". The least abundant protein in the viral envelope is called "envelope protein". Yes thank you, that's not confusing at all :p)
 * But I do think it's clear that the WP:PRIMARYTOPIC for this subject is the coronavirus spike protein. This article is getting a thousand views a day, virtually all of which are readers here because of coronavirus news, and we're now giving those readers a two-paragraph stub. A Google search for "spike protein" in a fresh private window puts our article in the knowledge box, and currently serves up this as the third hit (which I'm ashamed to say I reinforced by clicking on it out of curiosity...). Even filtered to 2018 or earlier, searches for "spike protein" on pubmed or Google Scholar turn up coronaviruses all the way down. Opabinia regalis (talk) 05:34, 16 August 2021 (UTC)


 * The coronavirus spike protein being the primary topic is a clear case of WP:RECENTISM, which is something we try to avoid with article primary topics. Will this be true in several decades time? As I have previously stated, the citation counts for coronavirus spike protein papers have been massively increased relative to other virus spike proteins due to the explosion of research on coronaviruses in the pandemic, which accounts for their prominence in the scholar results, which ranks papers based on citations. The massively increased relative citations within the last 2 years are also likely to have influenced the pubmed results. We need to take a long view on how the term is used in virological nomenclature. Hemiauchenia (talk) 05:49, 16 August 2021 (UTC)
 * Several decades? No, by then Wikipedia will be an ancient relic remembered only by the great-great-great-great-granddaughter of GPT-3 :) That is, if we haven't fried the planet to a burnt crisp by then. For the forseeable future, people wanting to read about spike proteins are looking for the ones that give you really good 5G reception COVID antibodies. In any case, I'm not a virologist but I am a protein structure person, and in my experience "spike protein" without further context has meant coronavirus at least since SARS. For influenza I'd just say hemagglutinin/HA, and HIV has spikes but they're made of multiple proteins.
 * A couple of months ago I proposed moving this article from peplomer to spike protein, but maybe it would be better as two articles. The general one probably at peplomer, since there are at least sources like Fenner & White that mention the topic as a whole under that name. And the specific one probably at coronavirus spike protein, for consistency with the other coronavirus protein articles (which, full disclosure, I also wrote and chose the titles for) and with the names used by Pfam, which calls these families "Coronavirus spike glycoprotein". That would leave spike protein as a dab. And then fix all the incoming links, of which at first glance all but three mean coronavirus. Actually, on looking at those links I'm warming up to this idea, because Microviridae links here but is really aiming at the unrelated bacteriophage major spike protein/protein G, which we don't cover under any title. Opabinia regalis (talk) 08:12, 16 August 2021 (UTC)
 * If spike protein has primarily meant coronavirus spike proteins specifically since the original 2003 SARS outbreak, then fair enough, it's just difficult to tell over the mass of 2020 citations. I agree that there is still a need to disambiguate between the usages "spike protein" given that the term has multiple meanings, but I am unsure over what form the disambiguation should take. Also feel free to move Spike protein (coronavirus) to Coronavirus spike protein, my apologies for not seeing your formatting of other coronavirus protein articles first. Hemiauchenia (talk) 18:39, 16 August 2021 (UTC)
 * To keep the edit history a little more organized, I moved my original userspace draft to coronavirus spike protein and redirected spike protein (coronavirus) there. I'll give it a bit to see if anyone else wants to weigh in before changing the incoming links. It's nice to see some interest since this article has been so weirdly overlooked for such a high-profile topic. I'm not sold on "peplomer" as the title for the broad page yet - it's sourceable from textbooks but has all but vanished from the literature. Opabinia regalis (talk) 08:53, 17 August 2021 (UTC)