We saw last week how sulphur dioxide released from the Laki fissure system accounted for many deaths due to poisoning. We will stay with poisons this week as well, for virus has its roots in the Latin term for “poison”
Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.thehindu.com
Nice article – and from a newspaper in India, no less! Adds to the history of virology in a very accessible way.
See on Scoop.it – Virology News
Alarmed by rising resistance to antibiotics scientists and governments are taking a fresh look at bacteria-chomping viruses first isolated a century ago from the stools of patients recovering from
Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.reuters.com
So nearly 100 years after Felix d’Herelle started championing phage therapy, the West is finally taking notice? I’t actually way past time that they were taken seriously: the Eliava Institute in Georgia has nearly that long a history (d’Herelle influenced the founder to start their enormous collection of phages) of successful treatment of bacterial infections, but westerners have stayed wedded to increasingly ineffective antibiotics for the last 70-something years.
I know what I might work on in my old age….
See on Scoop.it – Virology News
Flu vaccines can be something of a shot in the dark. Not only must they be given yearly, there’s no guarantee the strains against which they protect will be the ones circulating once the season arrives. New research by Rockefeller University scientists and their colleagues suggests it may be possible to harness a previously unknown mechanism within the immune system to create more effective and efficient vaccines against this ever-mutating virus.
Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.news-medical.net
So: antibody-antigen complexes work better than antigen alone – and sialylation of the antibody is important. Vaccinology really is entering the 21st century!
See on Scoop.it – Virology News
Dear ViroBlogy and Virology News followers:
Anna-Lise Williamson and I plan to have another in our irregular series of “Virology Africa” conferences in November-December 2015, in Cape Town.
As previously, the conference will run over 3 days or so, possibly with associated workshops, and while the venue is not decided, we would like to base it at least partially in the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront.
We also intend to cover the whole spectrum of virology, from human through animal to plant; clinical aspects and biotechnology.
We intend to make it as cheap as possible so that students can come. We will also not be inviting a slate of international speakers, as we have found that we always get quite an impressive slate without having to fund them fully.
It is also the intention to have a Plant Molecular Farming workshop – concentrating on plant-made vaccines – concurrently with the conference, in order to leverage existing bilateral travel grants with international partners. If anyone else has such grants that could be similarly leveraged, it would be greatly appreciated.
See you in Cape Town in 2015!
Ed + Anna-Lise
See on Scoop.it – Virology News
RNA interference (RNAi) is a powerful approach for elucidating gene functions in a variety of organisms, including phytopathogenic fungi. In such fungi, RNAi has been induced by expressing hairpin RNAs delivered through plasmids, sequences integrated in fungal or plant genomes, or by RNAi generated in planta by a plant virus infection. All these approaches have some drawbacks ranging from instability of hairpin constructs in fungal cells to difficulties in preparing and handling transgenic plants to silence homologous sequences in fungi grown on these plants.
Here we show that RNAi can be expressed in the phytopathogenic fungus Colletotrichum acutatum (strain C71) by virus-induced gene silencing (VIGS) without a plant intermediate, but by using the direct infection of a recombinant virus vector based on the plant virus, tobacco mosaic virus (TMV). We provide evidence that a wild-type isolate of TMV is able to enter C71 cells grown in liquid medium, replicate, and persist therein. With a similar approach, a recombinant TMV vector carrying a gene for the ectopic expression of the green fluorescent protein (GFP) induced the stable silencing of the GFP in the C. acutatumtransformant line 10 expressing GFP derived from C71.
The TMV-based vector also enabled C. acutatum to transiently express exogenous GFP up to six subcultures and for at least 2 mo after infection, without the need to develop transformation technology. With these characteristics, we anticipate this approach will find wider application as a tool in functional genomics of filamentous fungi.
TMV graphic from Russell Kightley Media
This is a nice paper for two main reasons: one, they were able to get VIGS – virus-induced gene silencing – working in a non-model fungus; two, they did it with TMV.
TMV! A plant virus in good standing, not previously shown to infect fungi productively, even if it has been studied in yeast as far as replication requirements go.
This is very interesting, not the least because it opens up the possibility that TMV NATURALLY infects some soil / leaf surface fungi.
Which could open up some investigation of just how the virus gets around, because it has always been touted as being only “mechanically” transmissible – even though we and others have shown it CAN be transmitted by aphids (reasonably inefficiently).
Mind you, Barbara von Wechmar and others in our lab showed in the 1980s that wheat stem and leaf rust fungi could transmit Brome mosaic virus and that Puccinia sorghi could transmit a potyvirus; they just did not have the techniques to look at whether or not it replicated too.
As far as my last post here is concerned, I think there is going to be a LOT of stuff coming out in the next few years on how “plant” and “insect” and “fungal” viruses are in fact considerably more promiscuous in choice of host(s) than we have hitherto been aware.
Now, just to prove what Barbara always said, that Tobacco necrosis virus is also a bacteriophage….
Thanks to Gary Foster (@Prof_GD_Foster) for pointing this out!
See on m.pnas.org
I have been fortunate enough this week to be in Pretoria, at the first Animal and Human Vaccine Development in South Africa Conference (Twitter #AHVDSA): partly because it is a very timeous and necessary meeting to help to establish strategies for this purpose, and partly because there is a significant presence of some legendary figures of international and South African virology.
Marc van Regenmortel – who we count as local even if he lives in Strasbourg – helped Bob Millar and others at the University of Pretoria to organise this meeting. He also used the opportunity of having a bunch of old virological friends visiting him at the University of Stellenbosch’s STIAS to bolster the conference presentations.
So it was that we have Errling Norrby of Sweden with us; we have Fred Murphy of Ebola fame; Marian Horzinek of veterinary virology repute; Marc himself, our iconoclastic viral immunologist; Jose Esparza of the BMG and an eminent poxvirologist – and Jean-Marie Andrieu, an oncologist with an interest in tolerogenic HIV vaccines.
Local legends are present too: we have Daan Verwoerd, legendary orbivirologist and former Director of the venerable and distinguished Onderstepoort Veterinary Institute; Henk Huismans, who did the first molecular work on orbiviruses in the 1970s, and is still active; Bob Swanepoel, doyen of the African haemorrhagic fever viruses.
Good people.
Oh, and of course, me and Anna-Lise Williamson; Dion du Plessis of OVI; Lynn Morris of the NICD; Albie van Dijk of UNW; Glenda Gray of the MRC, among 150 delegates
A great meeting, all in all, and very timely, given the contents of the SA Governmental Bioeconomy Strategy document released recently.
Jean-Marie Andrieu; Marc van Regenmortel – at a VERY good unofficial dinner
Legends and friends at supper: Marc, Fred, Eric Etter (CIRAD); Jose Esparza; Marian Horzinek; Errling, Anna-Lise Williamson
See on Scoop.it – Virology News
A novel virus thought to have come from human samples appears to have been derived from seawater during the manufacture of tubes used to extract DNA.
I have a problem with the original report, in J Virol (http://jvi.asm.org/content/early/2013/09/05/JVI.02323-13.abstract?related-urls=yes&legid=jvi;JVI.02323-13v1): not that they discovered it, because that was done well. However, they essentially REdiscovered something that was ±100% identical to a virus already sequenced and named by Chinese researchers – who did not use the Qiagen kits, apparently – and then gave it a new name!
Sorry, that is simply bad practice! It also smacks of scientific imperialism of a sort that characterised early discovery work on HTLVs and on HIV, when US researchers calmly treated earlier characterisations as if they had never happened.
There is another leap that I do not think is justified: the authors claim that
"Analysis of environmental metagenome libraries detected PHV sequences in coastal marine waters of North America, suggesting that a potential association between PHV and diatoms (algae) that generate the silica matrix used in the spin columns may have resulted in inadvertent viral contamination during manufacture".
Really? On the basis of presence of a sequence in a metagenomic trawl? No resampling with specific primers on a fresh sample? And surely the generation of the silica matrix is done under conditions that would totally destroy adventitiious DNA?
So – an interesting paper, and a valuable notification (although it might have been nicer if they’d shared their findings informally, to save other people like our Virology Diagnostics lab time and money). But flawed, in my opinion.
See on www.the-scientist.com
See on Scoop.it – Virology News
This is synchronicity, of a sort, seeing as I recently blogged on whole-virus electrophoresis done in our labs sometime in the late 1970s. This is a whole lot more complicated, as it happens, but still a useful tool. If you can get enough virus, that is!
See on www.starhi.com
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