“Corona” in coronavirus means crown in Latin. It describes the proteins sticking out on the outer fat membrane that makes the virus look like it’s wearing a crown of spikes. In fact, these are called spike proteins and they bind to the ACE2 receptors found in many lung cells.

All the messenger RNA vaccines order the ribosomes in our cells to produce the coronavirus spike protein. But this spike protein does not come attached to the coronavirus fat membrane where they belong. So the proteins had to be modified to closely approximate this effect in you.

The scientists did this by creating two proline mutations to the coronavirus spike protein in order to lock the protein’s shape into the membrane bound pre-fusion conformation. The hope is that this modification makes the protein nearly identical to the real shape in real life.

My question, since this is the first time we are using mRNA technology on such a large scale in humans, is how do we know that the two proline mutations used to engineer the spike protein exactly matches the behavior of the real spike protein attached to the coronavirus membrane?