ScienceDaily
Your source for the latest research news
Follow Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Subscribe RSS Feeds Newsletters
New:
  • Black Death Shaped Evolution of Immunity Genes
  • Methane-Eating 'Borgs' Taking Earth's Microbes
  • Pain Relief Without Side Effects and Addiction
  • Accounting For Dark Energy and Dark Matter
  • Meet the First Neanderthal Family
  • Physicists Confirm Hitch in Proton Structure
  • Five Hours' Sleep a Night: Disease Risk
  • Energetics of Piercing Fangs and Claws
  • Hair Straightening Chemicals and Uterine Cancer
  • Ostriches With Similar Interests Form Groups
advertisement
Follow all of ScienceDaily's latest research news and top science headlines!
Science News
from research organizations

1

2

Innate virus-killing power discovered in mammals

Date:
October 10, 2013
Source:
University of California - Riverside
Summary:
Scientists have a promising new approach to combating deadly human viruses thanks to an educated hunch by a microbiology professor, and his 20 years of research on plants, fruit flies, nematodes and mice. Researchers have discovered that, like plants and invertebrate animals, mammals use the RNA interference process to destroy viruses within their own cells. Until now, scientists were unable to prove that mammals use RNAi for killing viruses. The findings could help create vaccines against deadly infections, including SARS, West Nile, dengue, Hepatitis C and influenza.
Share:
FULL STORY

Scientists have a promising new approach to combating deadly human viruses thanks to an educated hunch by University of California, Riverside microbiology professor Shou-Wei Ding, and his 20 years of research on plants, fruit flies, nematodes and mice to show the truth in his theory.

advertisement

Researchers led by Ding, who heads a lab in UC Riverside's Institute for Integrative Genome Biology, have discovered that, like plants and invertebrate animals, mammals use the RNA interference (RNAi) process to destroy viruses within their own cells.

Their findings will be published in the Oct. 11 issue of the journal Science.

Until now, scientists were unable to prove that mammals use RNAi for killing viruses, but ironically, it was Ding's earlier research into plants, nematodes and fruit flies that helped him find the key: viruses have been outwitting that innate protection in our cells by using proteins to suppress our virus-killing mechanism.

Remove the suppressor protein from the virus, Ding's research discovered, and the subject's body will quickly eliminate the virus using the RNAi process, which sends out small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) to kill the disease.

In their research on young mice, for instance, all the subjects died when they were infected with the Nodamura virus, but when Ding's researchers removed the suppressor protein called B2 from the virus, the infected mice began producing huge armies of the virus-attacking siRNAs and lived, unaffected by the otherwise lethal infection.

advertisement

"Many have tried to do this, that is, find the viral siRNAs in mammals, but they could not find the key," said Ding. "The key was our prior knowledge of the B2 protein in the Nodamura virus, a virus few people know about. Other scientists asked me, 'What is the Nodamura virus?' They have been studying the more well-known human viruses, but Nodamura virus infection of mice proves to be the best model."

How did Ding know where to look? The China native was partly acting on a hunch that started when he was a graduate student at the Australia National University in the late 1980s. There, during a lecture, he learned that the genomes of viruses infecting plants and animals are actually very similar, even though plants and animals are very different.

That, and further discussions with his mentor Adrian Gibbs, an expert on molecular evolution of viruses and a fellow of the Australian Academy of Sciences, "made me think there must be a common anti-viral mechanism in plants and animals to keep their viruses similar," he said.

Ding produced the first evidence for that hypothesis while working with Bob Symons in the Waite Institute in South Australia, studying cucumber mosaic virus, a devastating, aphid-carried disease that infects more than 1,000 plant species, including many important crops.

Using computational analytical skills learned from Gibbs, Ding discovered a small gene in the virus other scientists had overlooked. He named the gene 2b and showed that it plays an essential role in helping the virus spread within the host plant. Based on his results, and published studies on the B2 protein of Flock house virus, an insect pathogen, Ding proposed in a 1995 paper that 2b and B2 proteins act by suppressing the host's antiviral defense.

advertisement

Fueled by that idea, Ding moved to Singapore in 1996 to set up his own laboratory in the Institute of Molecular Agrobiology. There, in collaboration with a British group led by RNAi-expert David Baulcombe, Ding's group discovered that the 2b protein did indeed suppress the RNAi virus-fighting properties in plants. Further, the group found that the 2b proteins of the related viruses all have the suppressor activity even though they share limited sequence similarities.

Ding joined the faculty at UCR in December of 2000 to test the other half of his hypothesis: does the B2 protein of Flock house virus suppress RNAi in its animal host?

Although RNAi was known as a major antiviral mechanism in plants by that time, few believed it was also true in the animal kingdom, which was known to fight viral infections by many other well-defined mechanisms. Over the next five years, Ding used Flock house virus to discover that fruit flies and C. elegans nematodes have the same RNAi virus-killing properties as plants, but the B2 in the virus stop their RNAi defenses from working. Remove the B2, and the hosts produce massive amounts of siRNAs and rapidly destroy the virus.

The findings, which were featured in a Science cover story in 2002, showed that RNAi is a common antiviral defense in plants, insects and nematodes, and explained why viruses have to keep a protein to suppress that defense. It also took Ding deeper into his fundamental premise -- "If RNAi remains as an effective antiviral defense in plants, insects and nematodes after their independent evolution for hundred millions of years, why would it stop working with mammals?"

To answer this question, Ding decided to use a cousin of the Flock house virus -- Nodamura virus -- that is lethal to young mice. In collaboration with Ding, the lab of Olivier Voinnet at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich also reported in an accompanying paper the detection of viral siRNAs in cultured mouse embryonic stem cells infected by the Encephalomyocarditis virus. These findings have opened the door to new ways to combat dangerous human viruses.

Ding's next goal is to raise $5 million so he can spend about five years studying new vaccines for human pathogens such as dengue fever. He is carefully optimistic about the findings to come.

"Maybe this is what we have been missing in knowing how humans combat viral infections," he said. "There are many different antiviral mechanisms in our bodies, but maybe RNAi functions as the most important antiviral defense mechanism. Maybe this is the one that really matters."

Ding's coauthors on the research paper are UCR's Yang Li, Jinfeng Lu, Yanhong Han and Xiaoxu Fan.

make a difference: sponsored opportunity

Story Source:

Materials provided by University of California - Riverside. Original written by Jeanette Marantos. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


Journal Reference:

  1. Y. Li, J. Lu, Y. Han, X. Fan, S.-W. Ding. RNA Interference Functions as an Antiviral Immunity Mechanism in Mammals. Science, 2013; 342 (6155): 231 DOI: 10.1126/science.1241911

Cite This Page:

  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
University of California - Riverside. "Innate virus-killing power discovered in mammals." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 10 October 2013. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131010142743.htm>.
University of California - Riverside. (2013, October 10). Innate virus-killing power discovered in mammals. ScienceDaily. Retrieved October 20, 2022 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131010142743.htm
University of California - Riverside. "Innate virus-killing power discovered in mammals." ScienceDaily. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131010142743.htm (accessed October 20, 2022).

  • RELATED TOPICS
    • Health & Medicine
      • Viruses
      • HIV and AIDS
      • Infectious Diseases
      • Herpes
    • Plants & Animals
      • Virology
      • Microbes and More
      • Endangered Plants
      • Pests and Parasites
advertisement

  • RELATED TERMS
    • Virus
    • Avian flu
    • Human parainfluenza viruses
    • Pandemic
    • Spanish flu
    • Roundworm
    • Transplant rejection
    • Rotavirus
advertisement

  Print   Email   Share

advertisement

1

2

3

4

5
Most Popular
this week

PLANTS & ANIMALS
Eating Late Increases Hunger, Decreases Calories Burned, and Changes Fat Tissue
Dogs Can Smell When We're Stressed, Study Suggests
A New Species of Deep-Sea Fish Discovered in the Atacama Trench
EARTH & CLIMATE
Battery Tech Breakthrough Paves Way for Mass Adoption of Affordable Electric Car
Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid Triggered Global Tsunami That Scoured Seafloor Thousands of Miles from Impact Site
Collision May Have Formed the Moon in Mere Hours, Simulations Reveal
FOSSILS & RUINS
Learning About the First Animals on Earth from Life at the Poles
Reign of Papua New Guinea Highland's Megafauna Lasted Long After Humans Arrived
How Fluctuating Oxygen Levels May Have Accelerated Animal Evolution
advertisement

Strange & Offbeat
 

PLANTS & ANIMALS
How Evolution Overshot the Optimum Bone Structure in Hopping Rodents
Model Calculates Energetics of Piercing Fangs, Claws and Other Biological Weapons
The Mona Lisa Effect: How Eyespots Deter Predators That Approach from Different Directions
EARTH & CLIMATE
Methane-Eating 'Borgs' Have Been Assimilating Earth's Microbes
Impact That Killed the Dinosaurs Triggered 'Mega-Earthquake' That Lasted Weeks to Months
Ground-Breaking Research Finds Pelagic Seabirds Fly Into the Eye of the Storm When Faced With Extreme Weather Conditions
FOSSILS & RUINS
Dinosaur 'Mummies' Might Not Be as Unusual as We Think
Reign of Papua New Guinea Highland's Megafauna Lasted Long After Humans Arrived
Sound Reveals Giant Blue Whales Dance With the Wind to Find Food
Explore More
from ScienceDaily

RELATED STORIES

Rabbit Virus Has Evolved to Become More Deadly, New Research Finds
Oct. 6, 2022 — A common misconception is that viruses become milder over time as they become endemic within a population. Yet new research reveals that a virus -- called myxoma -- that affects rabbits has become ...
Hollow Nano-Objects Made of DNA Could Trap Viruses and Render Them Harmless
July 15, 2021 — To date, there are no effective antidotes against most virus infections. Scientists have now developed a new approach: they engulf and neutralize viruses with nano-capsules tailored from genetic ...
Insulin Can Increase Mosquitoes' Immunity to West Nile Virus
Nov. 13, 2019 — A discovery has the potential to inhibit the spread of West Nile virus as well as Zika and dengue viruses. The researchers demonstrated that mammalian insulin activated an antiviral immunity pathway ...
Compound Made Inside Human Body Stops Viruses from Replicating
June 20, 2018 — A team of researchers has identified the mode of action of viperin, a naturally occurring enzyme in humans and other mammals that is known to have antiviral effects on viruses such as West Nile, ...
advertisement


SD
  • SD
    • Home Page
    • Top Science News
    • Latest News
  • Home
    • Home Page
    • Top Science News
    • Latest News
  • Health
    • View all the latest top news in the health sciences,
      or browse the topics below:
      Health & Medicine
      • Allergy
      • Alternative Medicine
      • Birth Control
      • Cancer
      • Diabetes
      • Diseases
      • Heart Disease
      • HIV and AIDS
      • Obesity
      • Stem Cells
      • ... more topics
      Mind & Brain
      • ADD and ADHD
      • Addiction
      • Alzheimer's
      • Autism
      • Depression
      • Headaches
      • Intelligence
      • Psychology
      • Relationships
      • Schizophrenia
      • ... more topics
      Living Well
      • Parenting
      • Pregnancy
      • Sexual Health
      • Skin Care
      • Men's Health
      • Women's Health
      • Nutrition
      • Diet and Weight Loss
      • Fitness
      • Healthy Aging
      • ... more topics
  • Tech
    • View all the latest top news in the physical sciences & technology,
      or browse the topics below:
      Matter & Energy
      • Aviation
      • Chemistry
      • Electronics
      • Fossil Fuels
      • Nanotechnology
      • Physics
      • Quantum Physics
      • Solar Energy
      • Technology
      • Wind Energy
      • ... more topics
      Space & Time
      • Astronomy
      • Black Holes
      • Dark Matter
      • Extrasolar Planets
      • Mars
      • Moon
      • Solar System
      • Space Telescopes
      • Stars
      • Sun
      • ... more topics
      Computers & Math
      • Artificial Intelligence
      • Communications
      • Computer Science
      • Hacking
      • Mathematics
      • Quantum Computers
      • Robotics
      • Software
      • Video Games
      • Virtual Reality
      • ... more topics
  • Enviro
    • View all the latest top news in the environmental sciences,
      or browse the topics below:
      Plants & Animals
      • Agriculture and Food
      • Animals
      • Biology
      • Biotechnology
      • Endangered Animals
      • Extinction
      • Genetically Modified
      • Microbes and More
      • New Species
      • Zoology
      • ... more topics
      Earth & Climate
      • Climate
      • Earthquakes
      • Environment
      • Geography
      • Geology
      • Global Warming
      • Hurricanes
      • Ozone Holes
      • Pollution
      • Weather
      • ... more topics
      Fossils & Ruins
      • Ancient Civilizations
      • Anthropology
      • Archaeology
      • Dinosaurs
      • Early Humans
      • Early Mammals
      • Evolution
      • Lost Treasures
      • Origin of Life
      • Paleontology
      • ... more topics
  • Society
    • View all the latest top news in the social sciences & education,
      or browse the topics below:
      Science & Society
      • Arts & Culture
      • Consumerism
      • Economics
      • Political Science
      • Privacy Issues
      • Public Health
      • Racial Disparity
      • Religion
      • Sports
      • World Development
      • ... more topics
      Business & Industry
      • Biotechnology & Bioengineering
      • Computers & Internet
      • Energy & Resources
      • Engineering
      • Medical Technology
      • Pharmaceuticals
      • Transportation
      • ... more topics
      Education & Learning
      • Animal Learning & Intelligence
      • Creativity
      • Educational Psychology
      • Educational Technology
      • Infant & Preschool Learning
      • Learning Disorders
      • STEM Education
      • ... more topics
  • Quirky
    • Top News
    • Human Quirks
    • Odd Creatures
    • Bizarre Things
    • Weird World
Free Subscriptions

Get the latest science news with ScienceDaily's free email newsletters, updated daily and weekly. Or view hourly updated newsfeeds in your RSS reader:

  • Email Newsletters
  • RSS Feeds
Follow Us

Keep up to date with the latest news from ScienceDaily via social networks:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
Have Feedback?

Tell us what you think of ScienceDaily -- we welcome both positive and negative comments. Have any problems using the site? Questions?

  • Leave Feedback
  • Contact Us
About This Site  |  Staff  |  Reviews  |  Contribute  |  Advertise  |  Privacy Policy  |  Editorial Policy  |  Terms of Use
Copyright 1995-2022 ScienceDaily or by other parties, where indicated. All rights controlled by their respective owners.
Content on this website is for information only. It is not intended to provide medical or other professional advice.
Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily, its staff, its contributors, or its partners.
Financial support for ScienceDaily comes from advertisements and referral programs, where indicated.
— CCPA: Do Not Sell My Information — GDPR: Privacy Settings —