Study of Fruit Fly Gene may Help Uncover New Flu Treatments

A study in fruit flies has resulted in the discovery of more than 100 proteins inside host cells on which influenza depends, researchers have revealed.

According to researchers, led by Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Paul Ahlquist and colleague Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, these proteins might serve as potential drug targets to stave off the infection.

These targets are the result of a study in which researchers tested the ability of a modified influenza virus to infect fruit fly cells.

"Our findings give us considerable hope that-with a large number of host targets to choose from-we could develop drugs to more stably suppress the virus and not allow the virus to evolve nearly as quickly to generate resistance," Nature quoted Ahlquist, as saying.

Fruit flies are not naturally infected by the influenza virus but researchers knew the fly would be a powerful tool in identifying the genes and proteins that facilitate infection.

A great many fly genes have counterparts in humans, and the researchers could analyze the function of individual fly genes using a technique known as RNA interference.

So, the researchers genetically altered influenza virus so that it could infect cultured fruit fly cells grown in the laboratory and they also added a gene that would produce a telltale fluorescence when the virus successfully replicated in fly cells.

They next used RNA interference - treating fly cells with small snippets of RNA - to individually suppress the function of each of 13,071 genes, representing 90 percent of all fly genes.