Health’s Blog

Scientists may one day be able to destroy viruses in the same way that opera singers presumably shatter wine glasses. New research mathematically determined the frequencies at which simple viruses could be shaken to death.

“The capsid of a virus is something like the shell of a turtle,” said physicist Otto Sankey of Arizona State University. “If the shell can be compromised [by mechanical vibrations], the virus can be inactivated.”

Recent experimental evidence has shown that laser pulses tuned to the right frequency can kill certain viruses. However, locating these so-called resonant frequencies is a bit of trial and error.

“Experiments must just try a wide variety of conditions and hope that conditions are found that can lead to success,” Sankey told LiveScience.

To expedite this search, Sankey and his student Eric Dykeman have developed a way to calculate the vibrational motion of every atom in a virus shell. From this, they can determine the lowest resonant frequencies.

As an example of their technique, the team modeled the satellite tobacco necrosis virus and found this small virus resonates strongly around 60 Gigahertz (where one Gigahertz is a billion cycles per second), as reported in the Jan. 14 issue of Physical Review Letters.

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Scientists have found a way to boost an organism’s natural anti-virus defences - effectively making its cells immune to flu and other potential killers. The process cannot be carried out in human cells - but it could potentially aid the development of effective new anti-viral therapies.

It works by stimulating production of the protein interferon, the cell’s first line of defence against viruses.

The study, led by Canada’s McGill University, appears in Nature.

If we might now have the means to develop a new therapy to fight flu, the potential is huge Dr Nahum Sonenberg McGill University

The varying forms of the flu virus have killed millions of people down the years, and scientists are concerned that the H5N1 strain of the virus, which currently is overwhelmingly a disease of birds, could mutate to pose a grave threat to human populations across the globe.

Other viruses, such as Sars, have also sparked global health alerts in recent years.

The researchers knocked out two key genes in mice that repress production of interferon.

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 by Elaine

Further to my article on UK school girls being vaccinated against the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV), there is mounting evidence that the HPV immunization program should be extended to males.

HPV is known to cause cervical cancer in women, and there are vaccination programs in many countries to immunize girls and young women against the strains of HPV that are thought to cause over 70 per cent of cervical cancers, for which there are 12,000 new cases and nearly 4,000 deaths in the US alone every year.

Previous research has already shown there is a risk of a range of genital and oral cancers in men also resulting from HPV infection, but as yet there are no immunization programs for men against HPV.

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Transfer RNA (tRNA) is ancient. It is the most direct intermediary between genes and proteins. Like many other RNAs (ribonucleic acids), tRNA aids in translating genes into the chains of amino acids that make up proteins. The fact that tRNA is so central to the task of building proteins probably means that it has been around for a long time.Professor Gustavo Caetano-Anollés and Feng-Jie Sung of Univeristy of Illinois-Urbana Champaigne had a hunch that understanding the structural properties of tRNA would shed light on how organisms and viruses evolved.

All tRNAs assemble themselves into a shape that, if flattened, resembles a cloverleaf. The team began by looking for patterns in this cloverleaf structure, using detailed data from hundreds of molecules representing virusesand each of the three superkingdoms of life: archaea (microbes that can survive in boiling acid, near sulfurous ocean vents or in other extreme environments), bacteria and eukarya.

“Perhaps in evolution there are things that are so fundamental that they are kept, held onto, for millions or even billions of years,”Caetano-Anollés said. “Those are the fossils, the molecular fossils, that tell us about the past. Therefore, studying these molecules can address fundamental questions in biology and evolution”.

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US scientists have discovered a possible reason why the flu virus is seasonal and tends to infect people mostly in the winter. It has a jacket that melts in the summer causing the virus to die off, and stays hard in the winter, until it enters a host where it melts and gets to work. The discovery could lead to new ways to prevent and treat the flu.

Neuroscientist Joshua Zimmerberg and colleagues, based at the Laboratory of Cellular and Molecular Biophysics (LCMB) in the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), in Bethesda, Maryland have used Magnetic Resonance Imaging to examine the outer structure of the flu virus and other respiratory viruses.

The coats are made of a fatty protein called hemagglutinin that hardens in cold conditions. When the virus enters a warm host, the hemagglutinin coat melts, and the virus gets to work infecting cells.  Hemagglutinin also helps the virus to bind to the target cell of its host, so the virus can fuse with it and allow its contents to invade the host cell.

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