NEWS ARTICLES
1. 2018's Top 10 research news stories from Purdue: "Most accurate picture of Zika yet creates potential for therapeutics." In June, a Purdue research team led by Michael Rossmann, the Hanley Distinguished Professor of Biological Sciences, announced that it had created the most accurate picture of Zika to date and identified probable drug-binding pockets on the surface of the virus — paving the way for a vaccine design. (LINK1; LINK2; STAT-NEWS;)
2. NEW YORK TIMES: "Scientists have captured the clearest and most detailed image yet of Zika, the virus that set off a global health crisis in 2015 and 2016 and left thousands of babies with serious birth defects. The work could contribute to the development of more effective vaccines and treatments to combat the virus." (LINK)
3. PBS NEWS: "What happened to Zika?" Last week, biologists reported the most detailed structure of the Zika virus to date, a finding that could help the effort to develop vaccines or anti-viral medicines. And Monday, a nationwide group of researchers reported in Nature Medicine that Zika causes miscarriages and stillbirths in a quarter of pregnancies in non-human primates. (LINK)
4. THERMOFISCHER: "Cryo-EM Gives Researchers a Detailed View of the Zika Virus Structure". Using cryo-EM, the team captured an image of the virus at a resolution of 3.8 Å. Two years later, the same team achieved an even higher resolution of 3.1 Å, and combined thousands of 2D images to construct a 3D model of the virus’s structure. (LINK)
5. JVI ARTICLE: Pacmanvirus, A New Giant Icosahedral Virus at the Crossroads between Asfarviridae and Faustoviruses. Pacmanvirus is a newly discovered icosahedral double-stranded DNA virus that was isolated from an environmental sample by amoeba co-culture. The pacmanvirus genome harbors 465 genes, with a high coding density. An analysis of reciprocal best hits shows that 31 genes are conserved between African swine fever virus, pacmanvirus, faustovirus, and kaumoebavirus. (LINK)
