Viruses
Chapters
page 1 of 4 pages | next »A Brief Introduction to Primate Evolution
Hans Zischler, Christian Roos and Gerhard Hunsmann
Functional aspects of genetic information as well as the diversity of different genomes will be major biomedical issues in postgenomic research. Genomic information from numerous organisms is closing in at an ever-increasing rate. Complete genomes are available from different pro- and eukaryotic ...
A Glance at Evolution through the Genomic Window
Eugene D. Sverdlov
A large number of various genomes sequenced recently for the first time make it possible to analyze evolutionary changes at a whole genome level, unlike a single gene level. Intra- and interspecies comparisons of the sequenced genomes demonstrated that the organism’s complexities did not directly...
A Role for Chemokine Activity in Alphavirus Pathogenesis: Evidence from the Analysis of Polyarthritis and Myalgia Post Ross River Virus Infection
Brett A. Lidbury and Surendran Mahalingam
Ross River virus (RRV) is an "Old World" alphavirus of the Semliki Forest group1 and the etiological agent of the most common arthropodborne viral disease in Australia. RRV has a positive strand RNA genome comprising 11,851 nucleotides in a single strand organized in...
Approaches to Viral Vaccine Development Involving Chemokine Receptors and Their Ligands, with Special Reference to Human Immunodeficiency Virus 1
Gordon Ada
There are currently registered vaccines against 22 infectious agents pathogenic for humans and candidate vaccine preparations against 18 other infectious agents have undergone phase II clinical trials.1 Some of these later preparations may become licensed for medical use wi...
Attachment Factors
Clare L. Jolly and Quentin J. Sattentau
As obligate intracellular parasites, viruses must bind to, and enter, permissive host cells in order to gain access to the cellular machinery that is required for their replication. The very large number of mammalian viruses identified to date is reflected in the fact that almost every human a...
Bacteriophage Lambda Terminase and the Mechanism of Viral DNA Packaging
Michael Feiss and Carlos Enrique Catalano
The developmental pathways of many double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) viruses, both prokaryotic and eukaryotic, are remarkably similar. In viruses as diverse as bacteriophage λ and the herpesviruses, DNA replication proceeds through a rolling circle mechanism where the circular genome serves as a t...
Bacteriophage SPP1 DNA Packaging
Anja Dr?ge and Paulo Tavares
SPP1 is a virulent double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) phage that infects the Gram-positive bacterium Bacillus subtilis strain 168. SPP1 belongs to the Siphoviridae family. The virion is composed of an icosahedral, isometric capsid (~60 nm diameter) and a long, flexible, noncontractile tail.1 The phage h...
Bacteriophage SPP1 DNA Packaging
Anja Droge and Paulo Tavares
SPP1 is a virulent double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) phage that infects the Gram-positive bacterium Bacillus subtilis strain 168. SPP1 belongs to the Siphoviridae family. The virion is composed of an icosahedral, isometric capsid (~60 nm diameter) and a long, flexible, noncontractile tail.1 The phage h...
Biomedical Implications
Dimitrov, Dimiter S., Christopher C. Broder
In spite of the high efficiency of the protease inhibitors, especially in combination with reverse transcriptase inhibitors, drug resistance and toxicity are of major concern and new drugs are needed to supplement the existing ones or be used as novel therapies. The identification of the HIV-1 co...
BK Virus and Immunosuppressive Agents
Irfan Agha and Daniel C. Brennan
The last decade has witnessed the introduction of several potent immunosuppressive agents in the field of transplant medicine. Contemporaneously, infection with BK vi rus (BKV) has emerged as an important complication of immunosuppression and an important cause of allograft loss after kidney tran...
BK Virus Infection After Non-Renal Tansplantation
Martha Pavlakis, Abdolreza Haririan, David K. Klassen
Infection with BK virus (BKV), a member of the Polyomavirus (PV) family, is ubiquitous, with the virus remaining in a latent form in the kidney and urinary tract.1.2 This infection is usually asymptomatic, but with impairment of the cellular immune system the virus can reactivate and lead to tiss...
BK Virus, JC Virus and Simian Virus 40 Infection in Humans, and Association with Human Tumors
Giuseppe Barbanti-Brodano,* Silvia Sabbioni, Fernanda Martini, Massimo Negrini, Alfredo Corallini and Mauro Tognon
BK virus (BKV), JC virus (JCV) and Simian Virus 40 (SV40) are polyomaviruses, highly homologous at the DNA and protein levels. While the human polyomaviruses BKV and JCV are ubiquitous in humans, SV40 is a simian virus which was introduced in the human population, between 1955 and 1963, by contam...
Chemokine Expression and Granulocyte Recruitment in Response to Acute Pneumovirus Infection in vivo
Helene F. Rosenberg and Joseph B. Domachowske
The use of appropriate infectious agents in mice to mimic viral infection in man is essential to the understanding of human disease. In this Chapter, we focus on our recent findings on the inflammatory responses to respiratory virus infection using a novel model to study diseases...
Class II Fusion Proteins
Yorgo Modis
Enveloped viruses rely on fusion proteins in their envelope to fuse the viral membrane to the host-cell membrane. This key step in viral entry delivers the viral genome into the cytoplasm for replication. Although class II fusion proteins are genetically and structurally unrelated to class I f...
Cleavage and Packaging of Herpes Simplex Virus 1 DNA Herpesvirus Assembly
Joel D. Baines and Sandra K. Weller
Herpes simplex virus DNA accumulates in the nuclei of infected cells as long concatemers. The packaging machinery recognizes signals within the concatemers, cleaves the DNA to generate unit length monomers, and inserts the cleaved genomes into preformed capsids. The goals of this work are to revi...
Complex Genome Comparisons: Problems and Approaches
Natalia E. Broude and Eugene D. Sverdlov
Fast progress in human and other genome sequencing has created a foundation for global functional analysis of complex genomes. Genome-wide interindividual, population, and interspecies comparisons of genome variability and instability provide most valuable approaches for deciphering spatial and t...
Connections, Implications and Prospects
E.Domingo, C.K. Biebricher, M. Eigen, J.J. Holland
Viruses undergo genetic change in each infected individual, pushed by mutational pressure and guided by the interplay between positive and negative selection, as discussed in preceding Chapters. The next step into the process of long-term evolution of viruses is transmission from an infected ho...
CX3C Chemokine Mimicry by Respiratory Syncytial Virus G Glycoprotein
Ralph A. Tripp
Chemokines are small disulphide-linked polypeptides that act as potent chemoattractants for many cell types including lymphocytes, monocytes, macrophages, neutrophils and NK cells. As described in chapter 1 chemokines are divided into subfamilies based upon cysteine signature motifs term...
Darwinian Evolution of RNA in Vitro
E.Domingo, C.K. Biebricher, M. Eigen, J.J. Holland
In the previous Chapter we described how quantitative measurements have led to studies of Darwinian evolution in action. Simplifications and abstractions were required, and experimental systems in which reproducible and constant environmental conditions can be established are of great ...
Diagnosis and Treatment of BK Virus-Associated Transplant Nephropathy
Abhay Vats, Parmjeet S. Randhawa and Ron Shapiro
The incidence of polyoma virus infection, particularly that of BK virus (BKV) in kidney transplant recipients has been increasing steadily since early 1990s. The diagnosis is generally made by a renal allograft biopsy. However the diagnosis can sometimes be difficult because of the pathological s...
Diagnosis of Hepatitis D Virus Infection
Jaw-Ching Wu
Hepatitis D virus (HDV) is a small defective virus with a single stranded circular RNA of 1.7 kb in size.1-3 Its hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) envelope is provided by the helper hepatitis B virus (HBV) for successful package and transmission of HDV.4,5 The antigenomic strand of HDV encodes ...
Discovery and Epidemiology of The Human Polyomaviruses BK Virus (BKV) and JC
Wendy A. Knowles
Although discovered over thirty years ago, many aspects of the epidemiology of BKV and JCV in the general population, such as the source of infectious virus and the mode of transmission, are still unknown. Primary infection with both BKV and JCV is usually asymptomatic, and so age seroprevalence ...
DNA Packaging by Bacteriophage P22
Sherwood Casjens and Peter Weigele
Bacteriophage P22 was isolated by Zinder and Lederberg1 a half century ago, and was immediately put to work by Salmonella bacterial geneticists because of its unusual (at that time) DNA packaging properties. It was the first generalized transducing phage to be discovered – a small fraction (~2%2)...
DNA Packaging in Bacteriophage T4
Venigalla B. Rao and Lindsay W. Black
Double-stranded (ds) DNA packaging in phage T4 and other icosahedral viruses is a fascinating biological problem. During packaging, a complex, metabolically active, concatemeric DNA is translocated into an empty prohead in an ATP-driven process and condensed as a highly ordered structure of near ...
Encapsidation of the Segmented Double-Stranded RNA Genome of Bacteriophage PHI 6
Minna M. Poranen, Markus J. Pirttimaa and Dennis H. Bamford
Bacteriophage PHI6 has a segmented double-stranded RNA genome that is incorporated into a preformed capsid during the viral assembly. The three viral genomic segments are packaged as single-stranded precursors, which are later replicated into the mature double-stranded genome inside the capsid by...
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