Science Daily May 24, 2023 There are currently no widely approved treatments or vaccines for the Lassa virus. An international team of researchers (USA – The Scripps Research Institute, University of Georgia, Tulane University School of Medicine, UK, Germany, the Netherlands) determined the structure of LASV glycoprotein complex (GPC) which mediates viral entry and is the sole target for neutralizing antibodies. Scientists have also struggled to isolate Lassa glycoproteins — the spike-like proteins that surround the virus and are the target of most antibodies. In the infectious virus, these glycoproteins exist in complexes of three, called trimers. For decades, however, […]
Category Archives: Viruses
New drug screening tool to fight the next pandemic
EurekAlert August 9, 2022 Broad-spectrum antivirals, (BSAs) and BSA-containing drug combinations (BCCs) are deemed as immediate therapeutic options that fill the void between virus identification and vaccine development. An international team of researchers (Norway, Estonia) has developed DrugVirus.info 2.0 (https://drugvirus.info), an integrative interactive portal for exploration and analysis of BSAs and BCCs, that greatly expands the database and functionality of DrugVirus.info 1.0 webserver. Through the data portal that now expands the spectrum of BSAs and provides information on BCCs, they developed two modules for (i) interactive analysis of users’ own antiviral drug and combination screening data and their comparison with […]
Animal vaccines with self-spreading viruses
Max Planck Society January 6, 2022 An evidence-based norm of virologists is that laboratory modifications of self-spreading viruses are genetically too unstable to be used safely and predictably outside contained facilities. According to an international team of researchers (UK, South Africa, Germany, USA – University of Souhern California) that norm now seems to be challenged. A range of transformational self-spreading applications have been put forward in recent years. In agriculture, for example, self-spreading viruses have been proposed as insecticides, or as vectors to modify planted crops. In health care, self-spreading viruses have been promoted as vaccines. Yet, glossed over by […]
Fighting viruses with interchangeable defense genes
Science Daily October 21, 2021 Although it is generally accepted that phages drive bacterial evolution, how these dynamics play out in the wild remains poorly understood. An international team of researchers (USA – MIT, Vienna, France) found that susceptibility to viral killing in marine Vibrio is mediated by large and highly diverse mobile genetic elements. These phage defense elements display exceedingly fast evolutionary turnover, resulting in differential phage susceptibility among clonal bacterial strains while phage receptors remain invariant. Protection is cumulative, and a single bacterial genome can harbor 6 to 12 defense elements, accounting for more than 90% of the […]