Higher-than-car-tire Internal Pressure Helps Virus Blast Infectious DNA into Human Cells

A new study published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society reveals that viruses that cause painful lip blisters, or cold sores, literally blasts its infectious DNA into human cells by making use of its internal pressure, which is eight times higher than that of a car tire. Alex Evilevitch and colleagues point out that the viruses responsible for influenza, AIDS and other infections that affect millions of people annually are quick to develop resistance to drugs that target viral proteins. Through genetic mutations, these proteins can quickly disguise themselves and evade anti-viral drugs. That has led to a search for vulnerabilities that don't involve viral proteins. Evilevitch's team looked at the pressure inside the herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1), the virus that causes cold sores.

They describe how HSV-1 enters cells, docks with portals on the nucleus and injects DNA with high pressure caused by tight packing of the capsid, the tough shell that houses the viral genome. Researchers already knew that several viruses that infect bacteria, called bacteriophages, use the same high-pressure mechanism to shoot their DNA into bacteria nuclei. Evilevitch and colleagues conclude that evolution has preserved this effective technique as a key step in viral infection — making it a desirable target for future treatments to defeat HSV-1 and other viruses that work the same way. The same mechanism exists in eight related viruses, including those responsible for mononucleosis and chickenpox in children, and shingles in adults. Drugs that interfere with it thus could limit "the potential for development of drug resistance that can occur due to rapid adaptive mutations of viral genomes," the scientists state.



Source-Eurekalert