Bioscience News - GEG Tech top picks

A type of freshwater plankton has become the first organism seen thriving on a diet of viruses, according to a new study by researchers from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in the US. 

The research did not find that viruses cause Alzheimer’s. But it showed that two types of herpes interact with Alzheimer’s-related genes and might drive the disease process.

The International AIDS Society president has called on the United States to "stay engaged" in HIV research. US President Donald Trump's proposed budget outlined funding cuts for global health initiatives.

A University of Alberta engineering researcher has developed a new way to treat common surgical masks so they are capable of trapping and killing airborne viruses. His research findings appear in the prestigious journal Scientific Reports, published by Nature Publishing Group.

A team led by researchers from Tianjin University (P.R. China) has solved the structure of the Zika virus helicase, which is a key target for antiviral development. The research is published in Springer's journal Protein & Cell.

Brazil: More than 90,000 likely cases of Zika in two months. The country's health ministry said 91,387 likely cases of the virus were recorded

US researchers have produced the first image of the Zika virus in 3D atomic scale, These finding could provide insights to find a cure.

In a recent study published on the bioRxiv preprint server, researchers evaluated the impact of gene amplification on cross-species adaptation. The researchers demonstrated that the impact of RhTRS1 gene amplification could effectively rescue viral replication in fibroblasts from partially resistant African green monkeys (AGMs). The team infected A549 cells with vaccinia virus (VACV) + RhTRS1 or the VACV strain named Copenhagen, expressing a beta-galactosidase (bg) reporter gene. The team explored whether amplification of rhtrs1 could increase the extent of viral replication in the absence of PKR. The team also infected RNase L competent A549 cells or regularly spaced short palindromic repeats with CRISPR in clusters of RNase L deletion present in existing A549 cells with VACV-RhTRS1, VACV-bg or AGM-A. The results of the study showed that A549 cells restricted VACV + RhTRS1 replication by nearly 10,000-fold compared to VACV-bg replication. The team noted that deletion of A549 PKR cells enhanced VACV + RhTRS1 replication by up to 1000-fold compared to PKR-competent cells. The team observed that RNAase L had no impact on VACV-bg replication. 

In research published in the journal Virus Evolution, scientists from Oxford University’s Department of Zoology have revealed that Next-Generation Sequencing and its associated online DNA databases could be used in the field of viral discovery. They have developed algorithms that detect DNA from viruses that happen to be in the blood or tissue sample of the species studied. The research focused on fish genomes as an example, but the method could be used to identify viruses in a range of different species.

Viruses are thought to outnumber the microbes on Earth; both outnumber the stars in the Milky Way. A handful of giant viruses have been discovered in the past two decades, and scientists report a novel group of giant viruses with a more complete set of translation machinery genes than any other virus known to date. They believe that this discovery significantly increases our understanding of viral evolution.

Microbiologists have discovered that the Cyanophage N1 virus carries a DNA sequence -- a CRISPR -- that is generally used by bacteria to fight off viral infection. The virus appears to use the stolen bits of immune system DNA to highjack their hosts' immune response.

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