Understanding how viruses survive in dissimilar preferences could take to new ways to fight them . Researchers have now built a complete model of the outer envelope of a influenza virus particle for the first time , allowing them to model how the membrane deport under various conditions .
The grippe A virion seems to taint seasonally and has a wide cooking stove of survival times in unlike environments . To good understand its infectivity at the molecular level , Oxford ’s Tyler Reddyand colleagues concenter on the role of lipide in the virus speck ’s membrane , which stay poorly understand .
To start , the team render the virus atom as a large ballock of loosely - packed lipide with viral spike proteins embed in the lipid membrane ( see prototype above ) . These glycoprotein protrusions on the Earth’s surface play a key character in the strength of the interactions between computer virus speck and host cells — which are determined by the number of spike proteins that can engage with receptors . ( That ’s what differentiates grippe A subtypes , which includes H1N1 “ swine flu ” and H5N1 “ bird flu . ” ) The 73 - nanometre egg contract down to 59 millimicron in just 300 nanoseconds , which is about one - fifteenth of the pretending ’s run - sentence .
Then , the team was able-bodied to mother various trajectories using a range of temperatures and various lipid compositions . Their computer simulation revealed that those viral spike protein spread out , rather than combine together . " If the separation of the spike protein is compatible with the ' sleeve ' of Y - influence , bivalent antibodies , this information might be exploited in therapeutic design , so that two antigen may be bound simultaneously for enhanced affiliation , " Reddy explicate in anews press release .
This approach for studying the membrane gasbag ’s construction and moral force could also be used to understand the computer virus particle ’s endurance in dissimilar environments . For example , previous enquiry has suggested that the bearing of influenza A in fresh water river allowed waterfowl to be exposed both to the grippe source as well as to residual anti - viral core from human universe runoff — which might lead to drug - resistant grippe strains . But for now , Reddy ’s simulation can only supervise the virus particle ’s stability on the micro - second scale , and the fresh challenge will be figuring out a way to study constancy over much long time scale .
Theworkwas presented at theannual Biophysical Society meetingin Baltimore this week .
