Identification of chemical ligands bound to Ebola virus and Marburg virus NPs from Chinese licorice.(A) The workflow of combining affinity MS and metabolomics approaches for ligand discovery towards NPs. (B) OPLS-DA score plots of the crude extracts, the NP incubation samples and the control samples show clear separation of three groups in the data sets of EBOV NP (left) and MARV NP (right). (C) VIP and S/N plots of features detected in the protein incubation sample and control from the EBOV NP experiment (left) and MARV NP experiment (right). Each grey symbol represents a feature detected in four independent replicates (RSD of S/N ratios across replicates < 30%). Each feature also matches its accurate mass with the Chinese licorice compound database. Red symbols annotate two putative ligands bound to NPs (GC7 and GC13). Blue symbols annotate the rest of 11 constituents in Chinese licorice that do not bind NPs. All color-coded compounds are identified by HRMS and MSMS analysis according to reference standards.
{}