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MEASLES, HIV, EBOLA MAY ALL BE RELATED - STUDY
Mar. 27 /99
Reuters
WASHINGTON -- Researchers were cited as reporting on Friday that the viruses that cause measles, AIDS, Ebola and influenza may all be distantly related, perhaps descended from a common ancestor. Scientists who have imaged the viruses say they all use a very similar mechanism to enter the cells they infect.
Virologist Robert Lamb, a member of the team at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Northwestern University in Chicago that did the work, was quoted as saying, in a statement, "The structure of this molecule shows that a widely dissimilar virus, a virus that everybody thought was very different from the other group, ends up in fact having remarkable similarities. It suggests a common ancestor among all these viruses, where one would have thought them not to be related at all." Writing in the journal Molecular Cell, the researchers were cited as saying that they used X-ray crystallography to look at the "fusion protein" of a paramyxovirus. The paramyxoviruses cause diseases such as measles, mumps, croup and viral pneumonia. The fusion protein serves as a grappling hook that snags the infected cell, pulling it together with the virus. The virus can then inject its own genetic material into the cell, forcing it to pump out copy after copy of the virus. The researchers were, according to this story, surprised to find their fusion proteins so closely resemble those of other viruses, such as HIV and Ebola.
Crystallographer Theodore Jardetzky was cited as saying that knowing just how this mechanism works can help scientists design defenses against it, adding, "The fusion protein was of particular interest, because for HIV it's been shown that if you can inhibit the fusion protein, you can block viral entry."
An experimental new class of HIV drugs targets this protein.