How to Use spike protein in a Sentence

spike protein

noun
  • The changes that lead to new variants tend to occur in the spike protein.
    — Theresa Tamkins, NBC News, 10 Sep. 2023
  • Those spike proteins attach to your healthy cells to replicate and cause illness.
    — Claire Gillespie, Health, 11 Sep. 2023
  • Its findings also don't show the spike protein is a health risk or a cause of vaccine injury.
    — Stephanie Armour | Kff Health News, ABC News, 8 Mar. 2025
  • The spike protein allows the virus to enter healthy cells— the first step to infection.
    — Kaitlin Sullivan, Health, 29 Sep. 2023
  • The spike protein is a key outer protein the virus uses to enter human cells.
    — Eric Berger, Ars Technica, 4 Oct. 2023
  • Immune cells in the arm muscle recognize the spike protein as foreign and sound the alarm.
    — Emily Mullin, WIRED, 22 Jan. 2024
  • That portion of the spike protein is considered an antigen.
    — Beth Mole, ArsTechnica, 7 Aug. 2025
  • The vaccines will also likely still be able to target the parts of the spike protein that have remained the same.
    — Claire Bugos, Verywell Health, 31 Aug. 2023
  • Cells then use those instructions to produce the spike protein as if they had been infected by the real virus.
    — Yasemin Saplakoglu, Quanta Magazine, 2 Oct. 2023
  • Other variants that have emerged since Omicron (like Eris) have not changed the virus's spike protein.
    — Olivia Evans, Women's Health, 29 Aug. 2023
  • This induces an immune system response to the spike protein that is present on the coronavirus.
    — Joshua P. Cohen, Forbes.com, 2 Sep. 2025
  • Those cells could potentially be killed by the immune reaction to the spike protein.
    — Scientific American, 17 Apr. 2023
  • Next, an electrical current passes through the sensor, which leads the virus’s spike protein to lose electrons.
    — Margaret Osborne, Smithsonian Magazine, 18 July 2023
  • In the Covid vaccines, the mRNA codes for a part of the virus known as the spike protein.
    — Emily Mullin, WIRED, 22 Aug. 2024
  • But the structure of these spike proteins can change as the virus evolves, causing vaccines to become less effective against new variants of the virus.
    — Hiawatha Bray, BostonGlobe.com, 9 Mar. 2023
  • Those that contain lots of spike proteins, which attach to human cells and start the process of getting the virus into the cells, are also more likely to spread.
    — Dr. Keith Roach, oregonlive, 7 Mar. 2023
  • The spike protein is located on the virus’s surface and facilitates its entry into human cells.
    — Amber Sayer, Health, 13 June 2024
  • Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the virus has acquired new mutations in its spike protein and elsewhere.
    — Emily Mullin, WIRED, 12 Sep. 2023
  • The spike protein is also the part of the virus that vaccines rely on to coax people’s immune systems into recognizing the virus.
    — Kyle B. Enfield, The Conversation, 28 Mar. 2026
  • In the vast majority of people, spike proteins leave the body within a few weeks of a vaccine’s being administered.
    — Aria Bendix, NBC News, 4 Dec. 2024
  • This spike protein is what’s targeted by vaccines—this allows the shot to lower the chance of infection or severe illness from the disease.
    — Kaitlin Sullivan, Health, 29 Sep. 2023
  • The spike protein helps the virus latch onto cells and is the target of the vaccines developed by Moderna and Pfizer.
    — Madison Muller, Anchorage Daily News, 19 Aug. 2023
  • This particular variant has four new mutations, including three in the spike protein, which is what the virus uses to latch onto your cells and infect you.
    — Korin Miller, Verywell Health, 8 May 2024
  • Given as a shot, mRNA enters muscle cells and teaches them to produce a spike protein found on the surface of a virus.
    — Stephanie Armour | Kff Health News, ABC News, 8 Mar. 2025
  • The vaccine uses a type of parainfluenza virus encoded with the coronavirus’s spike protein to train the immune system to recognize and fight it.
    — Denise Chow, NBC News, 24 Feb. 2023
  • This hybrid contained the spike protein gene of the Omicron variant inserted into the genome of the original Wuhan strain of the virus.
    — Dave Wessner, Forbes, 9 Mar. 2023
  • With the Covid vaccine, mRNA instructs cells in the body to make the particular piece of the virus’s spike protein.
    — Jen Christensen, CNN Money, 6 Aug. 2025
  • The three variants do not differ much in their spike protein, which is the target of the vaccines, so a vaccine targeting any should be effective against all three, experts told the panel.
    — Karen Weintraub, USA TODAY, 16 June 2023
  • What makes most of the newer variants different is mutations in the spike protein, which is what the virus uses to enter and infect cells, Binnicker explained.
    — Mary Kekatos, ABC News, 7 Sep. 2023
  • Some cases of long Covid are thought to result from the persistence of the spike protein of the coronavirus, resulting in a heightened state of inflammation in the body.
    — Apoorva Mandavilli, New York Times, 19 Feb. 2025

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'spike protein.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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