by Ananya Sen, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign From left: Brian Cunningham, Amanda Bacon, Aaron Jankelow, Katherine Koprowski, Han Keun Lee, Weijing Wang, Robert Stavins, and Enrique Valera. Bacon and Koprowski are holding the instrument and the cartridge, respectively. Credit: Julia Pollack As seen with the COVID-19 pandemic, detection methods that are rapid, simple, accurate, and...
by Megan Fellman, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine Cross-section of Zika virus. Credit: David Goodsell The world knows SARS-CoV-2 intimately now, but there are more than 200 virus species capable of infecting humans and causing disease. And they all want to do the same thing: Invade the host cells, hijack each cell’s machinery and...
by Biophysical Society A structure of an antibody, called Z004 (shown in purple), bound to the envelope domain III protein of Zika virus (shown in gold). Credit: Shannon Esswein. The Zika outbreak of 2015 and 2016 is having lasting impacts on children whose mothers became infected with the virus while they were pregnant. Though the numbers...
UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND In a study published in Autophagy, researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) shed new light on how Zika virus hijacks our own cellular machinery to break down a protein that is essential for neurological development and cellular communication, getting it to “eat itself”. By triggering this process known as autophagy, Zika virus is able...
