The paper begins to define the mechanism that allows the protein to unfold and refold in a snap changing its form to expose a peptide that attaches the virus to a cell and begins infection. The researchers believe therapeutic drugs can use this mechanism to shut the virus down. This protein starts in a folded state and goes through a global transformation refolding in a completely different state said Onuchic co-director of Rice's Center for Theoretical Biological Physics (CTBP). But there's a small part in the center that evolution has conserved. That single conserved amino acid residue is the hitch
