Word: viruses
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...then returned to Bangkok. Less than two weeks later, Pranee died of bird flu, the country's 10th confirmed victim of the disease?but one with a major distinction. On Sept. 28, a joint World Health Organization (WHO) and Thai investigation announced what scientists studying the H5N1 bird-flu virus had long feared: Pranee hadn't contracted the disease from chickens. She had almost certainly caught it in the hospital while nursing her dying daughter. Human-to-human transmission of the virus was possible...
...study involved the first-ever use on an infectious disease of a new research technique called chemical genetics. Every virus presents scientists with a new kind of genetic code?the challenge is to figure out how to decipher it to gain a fuller understanding of how the virus works and how to combat it. In the past, such research was often slow and laborious. But thanks to chemical genetics?which allows scientists to quickly test how a new virus reacts with thousands of different chemicals?viruses that might have remained indecipherable for years can now be at least partially unlocked...
...point of both chemical and classical genetic research is to figure out which genes do what?in effect, to learn to read an organism's genetic language. In classical genetics, scientists usually mutate an organism, see how its functions have changed (a mutated virus might no longer be infectious) and then work back and identify which gene mutated. If a mutated virus loses its ability to infect a cell, then that gene probably has something to do with infectivity. In chemical genetics, explains Dr. Richard Kao, the lead researcher on the HKU study, scientists try do the same by testing...
...wells of a small, waffle-like board with samples of the coronavirus cultured in cell lines. Microscopic amounts of different chemical compounds were introduced into each separate well using a $180,000 machine called an automated high-throughput screening platform. Once the chemicals had time to interact with the virus, scientists could examine the results with an inverted microscope. The process was repeated until all 50,240 compounds in their chemical library had been tested, which took a few months. "You'd think it'd be tedious work, but it's really not that bad," says Kao. If the chemical...
...With help from their collaborators at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center in New York, Kao and his colleagues discovered that one of 104 compounds inhibited a kind of viral processing inside the cell, six inhibited viral replication and 18 seemed to prevent the virus from entering the cell in the first place. (Kao says further work will be needed to figure out which viral genes the remaining 78 compounds affect. One of them seems to affect both processing and replication.) A number of these compounds could form the basis for promising anti-SARS drugs, and HKU plans to begin...