“But while smallpox has been eradicated in the wild, there are fears that it could be used as a bioweapon. “Smallpox is the most famous and lethal disease caused by a poxvirus, with 1 in 3 infected people dying,” said Professor Wolf, who leads the Molecular Cryo-Electron Microscopy Unit. Researchers now use the Vaccinia virus as a model for all poxviruses. Once synthesized, it acts as a scaffold building block for the Vaccinia virus – a harmless strain developed in the laboratory as a vaccine against smallpox. “If the scaffold can’t form, then replication of the virus stops.”ĭ13 is a trimer protein, as it is formed from three identical protein chains. “D13 is a key target for research, because if you know how the scaffold is assembled, you can design new drugs that prevent it from forming,” said Professor Jaekyung Hyun, a former staff scientist in the OIST Molecular Cryo-Electron Microscopy Unit, and now Assistant Professor at Pusan National University in South Korea. Reporting today in Nature Communications, the scientists revealed the structure of a protein called D13, in near-atomic resolution, and showed how it assembles with other copies of D13 to form scaffold-like structures. Researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) have revealed how poxviruses build their scaffold - a temporary protein coat that forms and disappears as the virus matures. The research could lead to the development of drugs that treat poxviruses diseases by preventing scaffold formation.The research team found that D13 proteins can interact in at least two different ways, with both needed to form scaffold-like spherical structures and cylindrical structures.When the helix was removed or modified, D13 proteins placed in solution were able to assemble into cylindrical and spherical structures.They found that a small helix structure needs to move position in order for D13 proteins to interact.Researchers used cryo-electron microscopy to capture high-resolution 3D images of D13 when assembled and unassembled.New research has revealed how a building block protein, called D13, assembles to form the protein scaffold of the Vaccinia poxvirus.
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