A breakthrough made by British scientists could be the first major step towards curing the common cold. The researchers have cracked a code that governs infections by a major group of viruses, including the common cold and polio.
Rhinovirus (which causes the common cold) accounts for more infections every year than all other infectious agents put together (about one billion cases), while emergent infections (with weird sounding names) such as chikungunya and tick-borne encephalitis are from the same ancient family. Other single-stranded ribonucleic acid (RNA) viruses include the hepatitis C virus, HIV and the winter vomiting bug norovirus.
Until now, scientists had not noticed the code, which had been hidden in plain sight in the sequence of the RNA that makes up this type of viral genome. But scientists from the varsities of Leeds and York have unlocked its meaning and demonstrated that jamming the code can disrupt virus assembly and prevent disease.
“If you think of this as molecular warfare, these are the encrypted signals that allow a virus to deploy itself effectively,” said Professor Peter Stockley of the University of Leeds, who led the study. “Now, for this whole class of viruses, we’ve found the ‘Enigma machine’ — the coding system that was hiding these signals from us. We’ve shown that not only can we read these messages but we can jam them and stop the virus’ deployment.”
This breakthrough was the result of three stages of research. In 2012, researchers at the University of Leeds published the first observations at a single-molecule level of how the core of a single-stranded RNA virus packs itself into its outer shell. The next challenge for researchers was to find out how the viruses did this, which they did through specially-devised mathematical algorithms .
In this latest study, the two groups have unlocked the code.
