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Scoop.it!
Ed Rybicki's insight:
For anyone who actually WANTS to check on the taxonomic status of their favourite virus?
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The results of the phylogenomic analysis of the virophages and related genetic elements are compatible with the concept of network-like evolution of the virus world and emphasize multiple evolutionary connections between bona fide viruses and other classes of capsid-less mobile elements. Altogether, virophages, polintons, a distinct Tetrahymena transposable element Tlr1, transpovirons, adenoviruses, and some bacteriophages form a network of evolutionary relationships that is held together by overlapping sets of shared genes and appears to represent a distinct module in the vast total network of viruses and mobile elements.
Ed Rybicki's insight:
Blow your MINDS, virologists...deep relationships between phages, human viruses, satellite viruses and big DNA viruses - as well as with diverse mobile elements within genomes.
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In a world first, a Singapore scientist and his team have developed a chip which can detect up to 70,000 different viruses and bacteria in one test.
Ed Rybicki's insight:
Virus on a chip: one better than gannet on a stick....
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On Twitter, anti-vaccination statements appear to be socially contagious while pro-vaccination statements are not, according to a team of researchers who tracked 318,379 pro- and anti-vaccine messages on the social networking website. Starting in 2009, the team from Penn State University tracked the vaccine-related messages that Twitter users were exposed to, and then observed how those users expressed their own opinions about a new H1N1 influenza vaccine. Positive sentiments would be, for example, an expressed desire to get the H1N1 vaccine, while a negative statement would be a belief that the vaccine caused harm.
Ed Rybicki's insight:
Viral sentiments spreading via Twitter...Twiruses??
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Could the next big animal-human disease wipe us out?
I do so love a good scare story. Especially about viruses.
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Even with the volunteers, experts say, there will be a long gap before hospitals can be fully staffed to care for the growing numbers of Ebola patients.
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A revolutionary gene therapy treatment for heart failure is about to undergo its first international trial in the UK.
Ed Rybicki's insight:
I love the way they manage to write an entire article without mentioning which virus it is, once...a free norovirus to the first reader who responds with the correct article!
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From
www
Nova Scotia's multi-million dollar strawberry industry is under attack from a mutant pest.
Ed Rybicki's insight:
"the result of two known viruses combining into a new, mutated form...": I love it. Mutated zombie strawberry viruses. Not many people think of mutant strawberry viruses...B-)
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Viruses have historically been classified into one of two types – those with an outer lipid-containing envelope and those without an envelope. Via Kenzibit
Ed Rybicki's insight:
...and hep A steals membranes from liver cells to circulate as an enveloped particle(s) in blood. This is a fascinating find, and doubtless will be followed by similar for other viruses.
The commentary has some speculation as to how vaccines work, if antibodies can't see the virus - but they forget the virus has to get INTO the host in the first place, and environmental forms are non-enveloped, AND that the vaccine may well elicit some degree of cell-mediated immunity, which would target infected cells displaying degraded protein on their surfaces via MHC I-type receptors.
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The worldwide emergence of ‘superbugs’ and a dry antibiotic pipeline threaten modern society with a return to the preantibiotic era. Phages – the viruses of bacteria – could help fight antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Phage therapy was first attempted in 1919 by Felix d’Herelle and was commercially developed in the 1930s before being replaced by antibiotics in most of the western world.
I have long had a fascination for the use of phages to treat disease - and now it looks like it's the new-new wave of the future, as antibiotics begin to fail. Image courtesy of Russell Kightley Media
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