Structure of Zika virus

Six months after Zika virus became a household word, we now know the three-dimensional structure of the virus particle. And it looks like very much like other flaviviruses, such as West Nile and dengue viruses. In the old days, solving a virus structure was a big deal. A virus is, after all, a very large assembly of many proteins. To solve the structure of a virus – which will tell us the location of the amino acid chains in three dimensional space – was a technical tour de force. It was necessary to purify large amounts of virus particles, and then find the conditions to produce crystals, a hit and miss affair. If you were lucky to grow virus crystals – which could take a year or more – you then crossed your fingers to see if they diffracted in an X-ray beam. When X-rays are aimed at a crystal, the beams bounce off atoms in the crystals, and their reflections provide information on where the atoms are located. Finally you could collect the diffraction data, do a lot of math on a computer, and determine the three dimensional structure. The first virus structure to be solved by X-ray crystallography was of a plant virus, tomato bushy stunt virus in 1976, followed by poliovirus and rhinovirus in 1985. Many X-ray structures of viruses have been solved, with resolutions less than 2 Angstroms that allow us to see not only the amino acid chain, but all the atoms in the side chains. The Zika virus structure was not solved by X-ray crystallography. It ...
Source: virology blog - Category: Virology Authors: Tags: Basic virology Information capsid cryo-EM glycoprotein symmetry viral virus virus structure viruses X-ray crystallography zika virus Source Type: blogs