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Gregory Babbitt

Spectrum News talks to Gregory Babbitt, associate professor in the Thomas H. Gosnell School of Life Sciences, about his research into how the virus that causes COVID-19 is still highly transmissible between mammals.

Scientists believe bats first transmitted SARS-CoV-2 to humans in December 2019, and while the virus has since evolved into several variants such as delta and omicron, a new study by scientists at RIT indicates the virus is still highly transmissible between mammals.

WROC-TV features research by Gregory Babbitt, associate professor in the Thomas H. Gosnell School of Life Sciences; Patrick Rynkiewicz ’20 (bioinformatics and computational biology), ’21 MS (bioinformatics); Professor André Hudson, and Associate Professor Feng Cui.

RIT scientists have uncovered new information about the way coronavirus and several of its variants attach to human cells. The researchers examined how coronaviruses use their spike proteins to attach themselves to the host cells they are attacking.

Kyle Diller, a fifth-year computer science student from East Windsor, N.J., developed a plug-in application for the molecular visualization program UCSF ChimeraX. The application is currently under development at the University of California at San Francisco. Diller’s plug-in allows users to display an atomic structure as if it were a movie so they can see how the structure changes.