Molecular Structures of the Alcohol Compounds

The main protease will also be too large for your software since it's a few hundred times the size of the molecule you've drawn.

The structure you've posted does however look like it might be an inhibitor for a protease. i.e it's a small molecule you stuff into one of the much larger bits of protein machinery that the virus uses to function, and hope it jams it up. Researchers throw thousands of different inhibitors like this at viral proteins to quite literally see what sticks. It is not part of the virus - it is one of a vast number of possible molecules people are using to try and use as a drug to treat it. You are fundamentally misunderstanding this if you think this is the thing that is mutating.

This paper has the structure of the main protease of Covid in figure 2, and a close up of the working site they're trying to block in figure 3.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6489/409

Hmm - the structures in Figure 1 of some of their potential inhibitors bear some resemblance to what you drew, although they're not identical. Is this where you got this from?

 

No, I got my information from this site, make sure to scroll the page further down -
https://innophore.com/2019-ncov/

 

Yay, I did guess right - it is a protease inhibitor!

Or rather it's one of many structures suggested by computer modelling as possible candidates for jamming up the main Covid protease. It doesn't look like any of this has been taken on to a practical experiment.

For future reference the structure of the viral protease (i.e. the thing from the virus where any mutation would be occurring) is the colourful ribbon diagram shown in a few of the figures. These don't display all the individual atoms and bonds as there are thousands of them. There are conventions to show the larger scale structures of ribbons and helixes in these proteins, as has been done here.

The annotations in the first diagram of "eye", "nose" "whiskers" etc are rather more unconventional, but do amuse me. I guess the protease is very vaguely shaped like the head of a mouse or similar. From the right angle and with a lot of imagination! (Although strictly that protease is from HIV-1, not Covid).

 

So to consume what is the main difference between enantiomers and diastereomers?

 

Crapulence severity

 

Enantiomers are by definition mirror images of each other. Diastereomers are not mirror images of each other, while still not being superimposable. An example of a pair of diastereomers would be the cis and trans isomers of a molecule with an alkene double bond. With multiple chiral centres you can also get diastereomers rather than enantiomers if some, but not all of the centres being different.