Killer Virus Uses Protein Wrap (Evade Immune System)

One of the deadliest pathogens on our planet is the Marburg virus, which can kill up to 9 out of 10 people it infects. Now scientists at The Scripps Research Institute in the US have discovered how this close cousin of the Ebola virus wraps a protein around its RNA to mask itself from the host immune system, allowing it to multiply unchecked.

Writing about their work in the 13 September issue of the online open access journal PLoS Pathogens, lead researcher Erica Ollmann Saphire, and colleagues, suggest their breakthrough offers new targets for drugs and vaccines.

Previous studies had already identified that the viral protein VP35, common to both Ebola and Marburg, was important to immunosuppression.

And they had also, from examining the crystal structure of the protein from two ebolaviruses, showed that it formed "an asymmetric dimer to cap the ends of dsRNA molecules".

But what was not clear, until this study, was whether the protein was able to mask the lengths of dsRNA that lie between the ends of the molecules.

Killer Virus Uses Protein Wrap To Evade Immune System

The virus has been imported into the United States (Colorado) and the Netherlands by tourists who visited Africa.