This week's addition to the virology toolbox was written by Chris Upton First, you may be asking yourself €“ Why viral bioinformatics? Good question! Although it€™s true that much in the world of bioinformatics can be applied to all manner of protein and DNA sequences, there are a number of ...

Hosts: Vincent Racaniello, Rich Condit, Karla Kirkegaard, and Marilyn Roosinck On episode #92 of the podcast This Week in Virology, Vincent, Rich, Karla, and Marilyn recorded TWiV at the 29th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Virology in Bozeman, where they discussed plant viruses and how they make plants ...

The illustration at left depicts a virion - the infectious particle that is designed for transmission of the nucleic acid genome among hosts or host cells. A virion is not the same as a virus. I define virus as a distinct biological entity with five different characteristics. Others believe that ...

Hosts: Vincent Racaniello, Dickson Despommier, Alan Dove, Rich Condit, and Welkin Johnson On episode #91 of the podcast This Week in Virology, Vincent, Dickson, Alan, Rich and Welkin discuss the nature, origin, and evolution of endogenous retroviruses (ERVs), and the recent finding of endogenous filovirus genomes in mammals. [powerpress url="http://traffic.libsyn.com/twiv/TWiV091.mp3"] Click ...

A more rapid method than Western blot analysis to detect a specific protein in a cell, tissue, organ, or body fluid is enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, or ELISA. This method, which does not require fractionation of the sample by gel electrophoresisis, is based on the property of proteins to readily bind ...