Diseases, Conditions, Syndromes

How does SARS-CoV-2 evade our immune defenses?

How does SARS-CoV-2 evade our immune defenses? It's a good question, actually. When SARS-CoV-2 defeats host defenses, we need to know how it does so, and conversely, when host defenses prevail, that also needs to be understood. ...

Diseases, Conditions, Syndromes

Scientists develop improved, potentially safer Zika vaccine

The worldwide Zika threat first emerged in 2015, infecting millions as it swept across the Americas. It struck great fear in pregnant women, as babies born with severe brain birth defects quickly overburdened hospitals and ...

Diseases, Conditions, Syndromes

How Zika virus knocks out our immune defenses

Zika virus and dengue virus are very close relatives. Both are mosquito-borne flaviviruses, and both specialize in infecting a host's dendritic cells.

Diseases, Conditions, Syndromes

How flaviviruses use mitochondrial processes to thrive

A team of Yale School of Medicine infectious diseases researchers recently conducted an in-depth review of the literature on how one genus of viruses, known as flaviviruses, manipulates mitochondria to evade immune responses. ...

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West Nile virus (WNV) is a virus of the family Flaviviridae. Part of the Japanese encephalitis (JE) antigenic complex of viruses, it is found in both tropical and temperate regions. It mainly infects birds, but is known to infect humans, horses, dogs, cats, bats, chipmunks, skunks, squirrels, domestic rabbits, crows, robins, crocodiles and alligators. The main route of human infection is through the bite of an infected mosquito. Approximately 90% of West Nile Virus infections in humans are without any symptoms.

Image reconstructions and cryoelectron microscopy reveal a 45–50 nm virion covered with a relatively smooth protein surface. This structure is similar to the dengue fever virus; both belong to the genus Flavivirus within the family Flaviviridae. The genetic material of WNV is a positive-sense, single strand of RNA, which is between 11,000 and 12,000 nucleotides long; these genes encode seven non-structural proteins and three structural proteins. The RNA strand is held within a nucleocapsid formed from 12 kDa protein blocks; the capsid is contained within a host-derived membrane altered by two viral glycoproteins.

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