The capacity of the surface glycoproteins of enveloped viruses to mediate virus/cell binding and membrane fusion requires a proper thiol/disulfide balance. Chemical manipulation of their redox state using reducing agents or free sulfhydryl reagents affects virus/cell interaction. Conversely, natural thiol/disulfide rearrangements often occur during the cell interaction to trigger fusogenicity, hence the virus entry. We examined the relationship between the redox state of the 20 cysteine residues of the SARS-CoV (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus) Spike glycoprotein S1 subdomain and its functional properties. Mature S1 exhibited ϳ4 unpaired cysteines, and chemically reduced S1 displaying up to ϳ6 additional unpaired cysteines still bound ACE2 and enabled fusion. In addition, virus/cell membrane fusion occurred in the presence of sulfhydryl-blocking reagents and oxidoreductase inhibitors. Thus, in contrast to various viruses including HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) examined in parallel, the functions of the SARS-CoV Spike glycoprotein exhibit a significant and surprising independence of redox state, which may contribute to the wide host range of the virus. These data suggest clues for molecularly engineering vaccine immunogens.SARS 3 -CoV is a new human coronavirus that causes a severe acute respiratory syndrome, sometimes with a fatal outcome. Its Spike glycoprotein is the major surface antigen and induces potent neutralizing antibodies (1-8). It is made up of S1 and S2 subdomains (2, 3). The S1 region interacts with angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2), the primary cellular receptor (9 -12), L-SIGN (13), and L-SECtin (14), whereas S2 mediates membrane fusion (2, 3). Here, we investigated the functional role of the 20 conserved cysteine residues of mature S1.A variety of evidence has shown that the capacity of the viral envelope glycoproteins to mediate virus/cell membrane fusion depends on a precise thiol/disulfide balance within the viral surface complex (15-29). On one hand, manipulation of the native disulfide network of mature envelopes at the virus surface using reducing or alkylating reagents has important consequences for their subsequent capacity to carry out the virus/cell interaction process (15, 16, 19, 20, 23, 24, 26, and 28). On the other hand, natural and specific thiol/disulfide rearrangements occur within several viral envelopes to trigger conformational changes that insert the fusion peptide into the cell surface leading to virus entry (20,21,23,(25)(26)(27). For HIV, gentle chemical reduction of Env efficiently prevents viral infectivity by inhibiting the capacity of the surface subunit (SU) to bind its ligands on the target cell surface (15,19). In contrast, after receptor binding, fusion mediated by the transmembrane subunit occurs solely following reduction of SU by a cell-surface protein-disulfide isomerase (PDI) activity (19,(25)(26)(27). For these reasons, reducing or free sulfhydryl reagents and nonpermeant inhibitors of PDI (e.g. the thiol reagent DTNB and bacitracin, ...