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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
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..
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 :-(
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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.
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...)
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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!
Not really a debate, it depends on your point of view. What sets virii apart from bacteria is that virii can't reproduce by themselves (they abuse other organisms for that). Drop a bunch of virii in an otherwise sterile environment, and nothing much will happen. Drop some bacteria in an otherwise sterile (but suitable) environment, and they'll quickly reproduce. But hey, this is kids biology stuff...
What it looks like under a microscope doesn't change any of this.No. Such phages have been used as a medical treatment in Russia and Eastern Europe for quite some time. There have been several popular press (Natl Geographic, SciAm, Discover) articles about the science behind them. They basically go out to a pond or other standing body of water, and bioassay the water to see what kills the bacteria they want killed. Then they try to reduce it to the active material (i.e., phage) that does it, and they go from there. It is suprisingly developed.
These are naturally occuring phages, not genetically engineered super bugs or whatnot. Of course, they are unpatentable in the US, so no one will research them here, although the patent would be unenforcable. "We go out to so-and-so pond, centrifuge the water, isolate phage EB517, dry it and package it into gelatin capsules". Well, just about any grad student could do the same thing.... No bioreactors required, etc.
The US way will be of course to identify a phage that attacks, say, E. Coli H:0157 (and ONLY Ec H:0157! There are too many other beneficial subtypes of E. coli in human guts that shouldn't be killed off...), and then try to do some genetic engineering to it to deliver not only the phage's package but also say a clusterbomb of penicillin or some other antibiotic, to make it "more effective". Then they could generalize from there and get a patent for using the phage for attacking E. Coli bacteria, or even for using phages as antibiotics in humans and livestock. That might get them around the lack of novelness of using phages against bacteria, which already happens in nature.
"The US way" (never mind that the pattern is just as likely to be used by large Swiss or Danish pharma companies as American ones) will run into the problem that there is a lot of similar work covered by patents in countries which have recently become full members of WIPO (and the European Union too) and thus by treaty have prior claim to patent protection in the USA.
However, actually engineering a better delivery mechanism or greater effectiveness could be extremely useful, whether it is promoted by or simply allowed by "the US way".
Your "clusterbomb" suggestion has two problems in that if the phage therapy is used to attack and an E. coli strain in the gut and get it to produce a bunch of antibiotic prior to being lyse, there is a risk that the antibiotic will kill the attacked bacteria before it explodes and releases copies of the bacteriophage (so, the antibiotic merely reduces the effectiveness of the virus and nothing else), or it will introduce tiny amounts of wide-spectrum antibiotic to succeptible microbes also in the gut (so, the antibiotic serves as a tiny selection pressure in favour of resistant genotypes).
Maybe a neater idea would be to manipulate the viral DNA to have it code a mutagen that affects the viral DNA itself in a way that encourages parallel evolution with surviving target bacteria, and another "edit" which makes the virus itself more susceptible to ex vivo conditions to limit its spread in the wild. (The latter seems like a very Monsanto thing to do...)