Getting a better grasp of manganese to fight flu

A simple three-atom tweak to a promising flu-fighting molecule makes it a thousand times more potent, scientists have found. The tweak allows the compound to latch onto both, rather than just one, of the manganese atoms at the heart of a flu enzyme, knocking it out. Such a drug could serve as a backup to vaccines, which can fail as the 2017–18 flu season showed. Vaccines rely on researchers being able to predict next year’s dominant virus strains. Sometimes, those predictions can’t account for the rapid mutations the virus undergoes.