Vincent speaks with Félix Rey about his career and his work on solving structures of a variety of viruses and the insights learned about viral membrane fusion and antibody-mediated neutralization. Click arrow to play Download TWiV 577 (46 MB .mp3, 75 min) Subscribe (free): iTunes, Google Podcasts, RSS, email Become a patron of TWiV! Show notes at microbe.tv/twiv
Prions are not viruses – they are infectious proteins that lack nucleic acids. Nevertheless, virologists have always been fascinated by prions – they appear in virology textbooks (where else would you put them?) and are taught in virology classes. I’ve written about prions on this blog (five articles, to be exact – look under P in the …
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 …
Since electron micrographs first revealed the bullet-shaped morphology of vesicular stomatitis virus (a virus related to rabies virus), understanding the architecture has been elusive. It was known that the RNA genome is wrapped in a helical structure by the viral nucleocapsid (N) protein, but how this structure was encased by the viral matrix (M) protein …
