( Using powerful computer tools and cryo-...)Unraveling the viral mechanism

In a report that appears in and on the cover of the current issue of the journal Nature, Dr. Wah Chiu, professor in the BCM department of biochemistry and molecular biology and director of the National Center for Macromolecular Imaging, and his colleagues, describe how they were able to look beyond the highly symmetrical ball-like surface protein shell of the episilon15 bacteriophage that infects Salmonella bacteria and describe different molecular parts involved in binding to host cells, injecting DNA into the cell and packaging it during the virus formation.

"This methodology, in theory, can be applicable to other kinds of human viruses," said Chiu. In fact, he said, this bacteriophage appears structurally similar although smaller than the herpes simplex virus, which causes cold sores and related infections. That means it should be possible to use these tools to understand better how this and similar viruses infect nerve cells and, some day, interrupt that disease process.

The advance occurred because of innovations in computational method development in addition to the powerful cryoelectron microscopes operated at very low specimen temperature and very high energy that Chiu and others use in their work that looks at different biological nano-machineries at the nanoscale.

In fact, Dr. Wen Jiang, previously trained in the BCM Graduate School for Biomedical Sciences' Graduate Program in Structural and Computational Biology and Molecular Biophysics (SCBMB), developed a new image reconstruction algorithm. These developments enabled him and his co-authors at MIT to see through the bacteriophage at very high resolution. "It turns out that, in addition to the surf
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Source:Baylor College of Medicine