Slashdot Mirror
Anatomy of a Virus
Roland Piquepaille writes "No, I'm not talking about a computer virus here, but about a real one, the Epsilon 15, which attacks the bacterium Salmonella. By writing a few lines of computer code, biologists from Purdue University have found a way to control a high-resolution microscope. This allowed them to look inside a virus. While previous teams were able to visualize the highly symmetric outer shell of other viruses, these researchers were able to see the whole structure of Epsilon 15, including its tail, its genome and even its core. This better knowledge of viruses which attack bacteria could lead to great advances in medicine, especially when antibiotics become inefficient because of bacteria resisting them."
How long before scientists are going to try and create their own anti-bacterial virus, a la some Michael Crichton novel? From TFA: "We need a new way to attack bacteria once they mutate, and if we can employ phages to do our work for us, it could be a great advance for medicine."
What, me? Never.
Granted, they made an improvement on existing methods used to interpret cryo-EM data, but "looking inside a virus" has definitely been done before, and for more important viruses.
Fascinating. Even more surprising is that researchers from Purdue are just now learning how to control a microscope...
So they don't look like teh little rocketship diagram we have grown used to all these years.
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/alllife/virus.gif
I've been having trouble mailing daddypants@slashdot.org - and this is not the first time where I've had this problem.
Have any other subscribers had similar problems? I just get a mailer daemon error from pudge@andover.net.
Weird.
Is this some kind of perl golf competition? What decent software for visual recognition (it would be needed for focus) and fine machine control is going be be written in a few lines of code. I hate when reporters make up technical data like it's completely irrelevant..
They wrote a program to control the electron microscope. What, was it before just taking random shots or something?
LOL , not this is not a virus !
As far as I know, the use of bacteriophages to fight bacterias has been mainstream for years in Russia. A recent article in Science et Vie explained this method and why it was possible to use it : there are so many different bacteriophages that they might outnumber the number of existing bacterias (a good thing, because that implies therefore a kind of competition between viruses, which means the most efficient will emerge in the long run :-) )
The article also explained that what wad actively sought was a bacteriophage attacking Koch bacillas, because some strains are now resistant to the two antibiotics used against them (named here P.A.S. and Rimifon). Once we have located the right bacteriophages killing them, we shall be able to forget antibiotics (viruses, however, might have their own side effects too... Wait and see)
Could be some Nobel prize in the air. I hope it will be granted to the people who deserve it, whoever they are, rather than to other teams just using the ideas of others and presenting them as their owns. The "Not invented here" policy has probaby killed enough people like that :-(
Signature omitted in order to save space. Thanks for your understanding.
There are some movies of this work in the supplementary info for this article. These illustrate the various "bits" of the Epsilon-15 virus.
It all goes to show that there is some really good work going on in three dimensional imaging of very small things. We're even seeing parts on the inside of these small things - it's just spectacular.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
There is a debate on whether or not virii can be considered a form of life... looking at this picture, I can't help but feel it is. Like a little bug with venom, it attacks our DNA instead of our nervous system.
1 voice in a sea of voices
Also I'm sure they had a very good reason for picking this virus as a first from a virologist point of view, whereas people suggesting they should have picked something 'more important' like AIDS are probably saying that because that's the only virus they know (if they even know the difference between a virus and bacteria - not to mention phage...)
Again a bit of insight, combined with reading TFA in question and perhaps a quick visit to Wikipedia would create much more useful reply comments... (and don't give me any of that "you must be new here" crap...)
www.tribalnetworks.org - helping tribal people around the world to own their own means of high-tech communications
Before anyone begins, the link goes straight to the article, not Roland's blog.
Keep up the good work ScuttleMonkey.
May the Maths Be with you!
Amen. There's some kind of pervasive groupthink around /. that says if it isn't about AIDS or starving children in Africa, it's a waste of science.
I was watching a documentary the other day on epidemics (didn't get the name of it) and they said that there exists a cure for stopping epidemics which are called antivirals. The only problem is it needs to be taken around 48 hours before infections and that the drug companies would never produce 6 billion of them.
Or does the image on the right of this look like a new boss monster for Half/Live III???
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
Like the fear of how relying on computers will lead to a scenario like "The Matrix" or "Terminator", what if we become dependant on these viruses and through some stroke of nature, they end up being harmful to us?
The following comment isn't meant to be anti-US, so please don't take it that way, but I'm trying to show an example where helping an enemy of an enemy can backfire and it's just the ones that pop in my head. For example, when the US helped the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan fight off the Russians, and then they became the Taliban. Or when the US helped Iraq and Saddam with the Iran war, and then Saddam turned on the US.
At that time, it seemed like the smart thing to do, but in came back to bite the US in the butt.
Will this happen with these viruses?
Amen. There's some kind of pervasive groupthink around /. that says if it isn't about AIDS or starving children in Africa, it's a waste of science.
No way! Include those wicked humanimal hybrids that Bush has revealed to us all!
As others have mentioned, bacteria become resistant to phages too, and a human patient's immune system will produce antibodies against the virus, rendering it much less effective.
All those little-bitty bombs, floating around in your blood stream, looking for a target to impact and go "BOOM!".
Think I'll need a big scotch before I go to bed tonight so's I can sleep...
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
In the future, china will trump all of corp america, they arent as savvy in the economic world
but they keep things simple, if theres a market for something, they can/will produce it, because
if its for the good of the state they will, kind of like a communist idealogy using captialist methods.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
You are new here.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
http://www.silvermedicine.org/usingcolloidalsilver .html
Lets just use silver ions to kill virii
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Really? Looks like a minor variation in image processing software that appears to pull more detail about a small virus. This isn't a revolution in imaging technology. I'm a little curious how the PR people managed to confuse 'control' with 'postprocessing' or 'reconstruction', but not too much. PR people are beyond mere surprise.
Specifically, a quick glance at the Nature article tells me that all they've done new is remove some of the assumptions of symmetry, weakening that assumption to the assumption that all of these viruses are identical and then very carefully reconstructed a 3d map of the virus based on reassembling these (thousand) of images from slightly different angles.
Nothing to do with control. If they had control, they would have many many images of a single virus and no assumptions at all.
It certainly does. Makes you wonder just how much of that reconstructed detail is real, doesn't it.Nihil Illegitemi Carborvndvm
i am sure that ninety-nine percent user of slashdot would recognize the "virus" as "computer virus" initially. probably that is the power of habits.
The cool part is halfway down TFA:
Probing the innards of the virus also revealed that it possesses a core, the existence of which the researchers did not suspect and the function of which they can as yet only guess at.
Cue the SciFi writers...
You're really hitting the nail on the head here. Though personally, I wonder why slashdot cares about AIDS so much. I mean, this is the singular largest body of people on the planet who are the least likely to contract it. (OK, don't kill me for that crack! ;)
The second mixup is with antibiotics. Antibiotics only help against bacteria; they do nothing against viruses. Viruses are not fought off with antibiotics, but with more advanced means such as reverse transcriptase inhibitors. Why doctors will still prescribe antibacteria to fight viruses such as the common cold is a different question, but it is biologically useless nevertheless.
So now computer virus are not real ones...
Satire daily reports "Scientists hope to be able to use this new form of identification to identify what, and where the virus -code named 'George W. Bush'- came from, and what the best solution is..."
Hey NSA, here's something for your surveillance scrap book! Tap this! Holds up middle finger