Tag: disease

From time to time, I make a mistake by failing to keep up with the primary scientific literature as closely as I should. If I had been on my grind, I would have noticed that another Zika structure was published in Science at around the same time as the Nature structure that I blogged about earlier. The group that put together this structure also compared the Zika particle to related viruses, this time choosing to focus on a region of the viral protein coat that is especially dissimilar to related viruses. The authors go on to suggest that this region of the coat may be involved in attaching to host cells, which could explain how transmissible Zika is compared to its relatives.