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New Imaging Sheds Light On Basic Building Blocks of Life
An anonymous reader writes "Scientists at the UK's national synchrotron facility are studying the structure of Containment Level 3 pathogens such as Aids, Flu and Hepatitis. They use high intensity X-Rays to study the atomic and molecular structure of pathogens too small to be examined under a microscope. This leads to a greater understanding of how they work. They have already produced results on the hand, foot and mouth virus. This is the first time Level 3 pathogens have been imaged in this way."
The causes of foot in mouth disease are too complex.
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Strange that this reads like a PR puff piece..
Quantum Mechanics explains Physics (but nobody really knows why).
Physics explains Chemistry
Chemistry explains Biology
All of biology (indeed, all of life) is created from an infinite number of configurations of the same small number of building blocks.
Like Mexican cooking.
AIDS(which, while nasty, is pretty stubbornly fluid-borne) shares a containment level with the flu(which, while merely annoying, cuts a broad and temporary swath through the population pretty much every time somebody gets the winter sniffles)? Are 'containment levels' based much less on ease of transmission than the name would suggest?
I think the term you are looking for (for the "philosophy-literate") is Supervenience.
One thing you'll discover investigating that is that your hierarchical arrangement does not necessarily apply, so thinking it universally does can be more of an indicator of scientific illiteracy, rather than literacy.
For example, the constituent atoms of paper money do not determine, and one cannot infer from that, the higher-order property of the money's value (as this is dependent on extrinsic factors, such as the economy). Assuming a universal to reality automatically because it is a premise useful to science, is an epistemological error.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
there's absolutely nothing new about using X-ray crystallography in the study of pathogens
The press release is horribly written. What they're doing that is genuinely novel, AFAIK, is crystallizing actual infectious virus in a biosafety level 3 facility. Usually crystallographers work with just the capsid or some other subset of viral proteins, which requires fewer (if any) special precautions. The native virus particles are typically studied by EM, which typically doesn't yield as high resolution as crystallography, but has the advantage of requiring much more portable and less expensive equipment than crystallography.
They didn't bother to link to the actual paper, but it is (remarkably) free online.
The press release is horribly written.
On this we agree...
What they're doing that is genuinely novel, AFAIK, is crystallizing actual infectious virus in a biosafety level 3 facility. Usually crystallographers work with just the capsid or some other subset of viral proteins, which requires fewer (if any) special precautions.
No, we don't. Intact viral particles are the norm.
The native virus particles are typically studied by EM, which typically doesn't yield as high resolution as crystallography, but has the advantage of requiring much more portable and less expensive equipment than crystallography.
While there are lots of EM studies of viral particles, X-ray studies are much more common - 33 full EM models versus 317 diffraction structures. The page I linked in the first response to this article shows just a few of the picornavirus structures that have been determined by X-ray diffraction studies over the past several decades. There are other virus structures out there as well, with an excellent website for anyone interested being Viper.
The rules are changing - for the early structures I'm sure care was taken, but the current strict containment rules didn't exist. I can't imagine rocking up to the beamline with poliovirus in your cryostat would be regarded as appropriate behaviour any more... I know that in the past I have been prevented taking crystals of human rhinovirus to some facilities even though as a pathogen it's hardly BSL 3!
The only thing that the OP noted that was of interest was the Diamond now has an on-site BSL3 facility so that you can handle such pathogens within the current regulations.