October 17, 2022
Researchers led by Nicole Steinmetz, professor of nanoengineering at the University of California San Diego, have received $4.3 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to advance their research using plant viruses to develop cancer immunotherapies.
November 2, 2023
Rommie Amaro, professor of molecular biology at UC San Diego, and her team use computers to investigate biological systems. Last year, their atomic-level computational model of the H1N1 influenza virus revealed vulnerabilities that could lead to more effective and longer-lasting flu vaccines.
June 8, 2023
Biologists have identified a previously unknown way that our immune system detects viruses. The immune protein CARD8 acts as a trip wire to detect a range of viruses, including the virus that causes COVID. They also found that CARD8 functions differently among species and varies between humans.
June 10, 2014
…have identified the evolutionary origins of human herpes simplex virus (HSV) -1 and -2, reporting that the former infected hominids before their evolutionary split from chimpanzees 6 million years ago while the latter jumped from ancient chimpanzees to ancestors of modern humans – Homo erectus – approximately 1.6 million years…
April 9, 2020
…of the global SARS-CoV-2 virus Of the hundreds of coronaviruses known to exist, many are relatively harmless. Coronaviruses infect your nose, sinuses and upper throat but often result in nothing more than a common cold (see Know Your Coronaviruses). So what makes the new SARS-CoV-2, the virus that has caused…
December 17, 2020
New simulations done on supercomputers may help researchers understand how these inhibitors react and potentially help to develop a new generation of drugs to target viruses with high death rates including SARS-CoV2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
November 3, 2022
This season there are three prevalent respiratory viruses to be aware of—influenza, SARS-CoV-2 and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), all of which are transmitted via aerosols.
November 28, 2016
Biologists have discovered that the evolution of a new species can occur rapidly enough for them to observe the process in a simple laboratory flask.
November 9, 2023
Rather than a slow, gradual process as Darwin envisioned, biologists can now see how evolutionary changes unfold on accelerated timescales. Using an arms race between bacteria and viruses, researchers are documenting complex evolutionary processes in simple laboratory flasks in only three weeks.
January 12, 2017
…have documented for the first time how very large viruses reprogram the cellular machinery of bacteria during infection to more closely resemble an animal or human cell—a process that allows these alien invaders to trick cells into producing hundreds of new viruses, which eventually explode from and kill the cells…
