FSU's Magnet Lab Researchers Deciphering Flu Virus

As the Northern Hemisphere braces for another flu season, researchers at Florida State University's National High Magnetic Field Laboratory are making strides toward better understanding the mechanics of the virus that causes it - a virus that kills between one-quarter and one-half million people each year.

Tim Cross, director of the lab's Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) program, and collaborators from Brigham Young University are trying to understand the minute parts of the highly virulent Influenza Type A virus. To do that, they are using all of the magnet lab's NMR resources, including its 15-ton, 900-megahertz magnet, to produce a detailed picture of the virus's skin.

"Using the magnet helps us build a blueprint for a virus's mechanics of survival," said Cross, who also is a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at FSU. "The more detailed the blueprint, the better our chances of developing drugs capable of destroying it."

The only magnet of its kind in the world, the "900" is critical to the project's process. Otherwise, an image this complicated would be impossible to obtain.

Cross and David Busath, a biophysicist at Brigham Young University, recently discovered key components of the protein holes, or "channels," in the influenza viral skin. These components lead to unique chemical interactions that are thought to be important clues for understanding how the channels regulate whether the virus can distribute its genes into host cells and reproduce or not. The researchers' findings were published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"This is a viral structure we haven't seen before," Busath said. "And yet,
through these tiny little doors, acids must come in and DNA must go out if the virus is to survive. The idea is to block the door to prevent the normal function required for the virus to replicate."

Once researchers understand how these channels are selective for acid, they can use that knowledge to fashion novel drugs capable of more effectively killing the virus.

The work is funded by a five-year, multimillion-dollar grant from the National Institutes of Health. Other authors on the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper are Jun Hu, Riqiang Fu, Katsuyuki Nishimura, Li Zhang and Huan-Xiang Zhou, all of FSU, and Viksita Vijayvergiya, a former postdoctoral fellow at BYU.

Source: Florida State University

Related stories:

Despite national guidelines, private insurers, ER, federal and state agencies fail to routinely test for HIV
While the U.S. AIDS epidemic simmers largely unnoticed by most Americans, a failure to widely implement routine HIV testing continues to fuel its spread, HIV researchers and experts said today. Almost 60,000 Americans were infected with HIV last year, and, nationwide, 50-to-70 percent of new sexually transmitted infections are spread by people who do not know they are infected.
Guidelines issued two years ago by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommend that all Americans ages 13-64 be routinely tested in all healthcare settings. Now, data show that although such testing could save years of healthy life and limit the spread of HIV, they are largely not being implemented.
Landmark study defines benefits of early HIV testing and treatment for infected infants
Testing very young babies for HIV and giving antiretroviral therapy (ART) immediately to those found infected with the virus dramatically prevents illness and death, according to a report in the New England Journal of Medicine. The study found that giving ART to HIV-infected infants beginning at an average age of 7 weeks made them four times less likely to die in the next 48 weeks, compared with postponing ART until signs of illness or a weakened immune system appeared--the standard of care when the study began.
Survival of head and neck cancer patients is greatly affected by coexisting ailments
Current estimates for head and neck cancer survival are largely inaccurate because they widely disregard many of the most common diseases such patients have in addition to their primary cancer, says Jay Piccirillo, M.D., a head and neck specialist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, the Siteman Cancer Center and Barnes-Jewish Hospital.
Web 2.0 gives new tools to hate groups: experts
Social networks MySpace and Facebook and video-sharing site YouTube are being used as powerful new tools by extremist groups to spread a message of hate, participants in a conference on Internet hate speech warned here on Monday.
Scientists fight stem rust UG99 before it becomes a threat
(PhysOrg.com) -- Wheat breeders and plant pathologists at Montana State University are part of a global effort to develop varieties of wheat resistant to a new fungus. UG99, a stem rust strain that was first discovered in Africa and is slowly creeping towards the United States, could be devastating to Montana's wheat industry.
Scientist Unlocking the Secrets of Sea Slug that Lives Like a Plant
(PhysOrg.com) -- Photosynthesis generates the oxygen needed for life on earth as well as the biomass for food and biofuel production. The process is driven by the absorption of the sun’s energy by tiny green "bodies" called chloroplasts. The "solar-powered" sea slug Elysia chlorotica has fascinated scientists for years because of its ability to retain "stolen" chloroplasts and carry out photosynthesis as if it was a plant.
Researchers identify toehold for HIV's assault on brain
Scientists have unraveled in unprecedented detail the cascade of events that go wrong in brain cells affected by HIV, a virus whose assault on the nervous system continues unabated despite antiviral medications that can keep the virus at bay for years in the rest of the body.
'Femtomolar Optical Tweezers' May Enable Sensitive Blood Tests
(PhysOrg.com) -- Cutting-edge “tweezers” are so sensitive that they can feel the tell-tale tug of tiny concentrations of pathogens in blood samples, yet don’t ever need to be sterilized—or even held—as they are ephemeral and weightless.

News discussion:

Medicine & Health news