• HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
  • CONTACT US
Saturday, September 30, 2023
BIOENGINEER.ORG
No Result
View All Result
  • Login
  • HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
        • Lecturer
        • PhD Studentship
        • Postdoc
        • Research Assistant
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
  • CONTACT US
  • HOME
  • NEWS
  • EXPLORE
    • CAREER
      • Companies
      • Jobs
        • Lecturer
        • PhD Studentship
        • Postdoc
        • Research Assistant
    • EVENTS
    • iGEM
      • News
      • Team
    • PHOTOS
    • VIDEO
    • WIKI
  • BLOG
  • COMMUNITY
    • FACEBOOK
    • INSTAGRAM
    • TWITTER
  • CONTACT US
No Result
View All Result
Bioengineer.org
No Result
View All Result
Home NEWS Science News Science

RNA interference is activated in human response to influenza, other important viruses

Bioengineer by Bioengineer
December 5, 2016
in Science
Reading Time: 4 mins read
0
Share on FacebookShare on TwitterShare on LinkedinShare on RedditShare on Telegram

Researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and the University of California, Riverside, have shown for the first time that RNA interference (RNAi) – an antiviral mechanism known to be used by plants and lower organisms – is active in the response of human cells to some important viruses. In their report receiving advance online publication in Nature Microbiology, the investigators document both the production of RNAi molecules in human cells infected with the influenza A virus and the suppression of RNAi defense by a viral protein known to block the process in a common animal model.

"Viruses are the most abundant infectious agents and are a constant threat to human health," says Kate Jeffrey, PhD, of the Gastrointestinal Unit in the MGH Department of Medicine, co-corresponding author of the paper. "Vaccines are somewhat effective but can have limited use when viruses like influenza rapidly mutate from year to year. Identifying therapeutic targets within patients that could help them fight off an infection is a critical strategy for combating the spread of common, often-dangerous viruses."

First described in the 1990s – a discovery that led to the 2006 Nobel Prize – RNAi is a process by which organisms suppress the expression of target genes through the action of small RNA segments that bind to corresponding gene sequences. Not only is RNAi used to regulate gene expression within an organism, it also can combat viral infection by silencing the activity of viral genes required for the pathogen's replication.

Whether or not RNAi contributes to antiviral defense in mammals has been uncertain. The only previous demonstration – by researchers led by Shou-Wei Ding, PhD, a professor of Plant Pathology and Microbiology at UC Riverside and co-corresponding author of the current study – was done in embryonic stem cells and in newborn mice. Ding has been studying antiviral RNAi for more than two decades and also was the first to describe the action of the influenza virus protein NS1 in blocking RNAi in fruit flies. His team collaborated with investigators from Jeffrey's laboratory to investigate whether or not an RNAi response is induced in human and mouse cells infected with the influenza virus, one of many important viruses using RNA as its genetic material.

Their experiments verified that influenza-A-infected mature human cells do generate the small RNA segments used in RNAi but that virally-produced NS1 blocks the processing of those molecules into the complexes that bind to and silence their target genes. If cells were infected with an influenza A mutant lacking NS1, they proceeded to produce large number of the molecular complexes required for RNAi, which include a protein called Argonaute that slices through the target gene.

Experiments in cells with an inactivated form of Argonaute – which contributes only to the antiviral and not the gene regulation activity of RNAi – confirmed that they were observing an antiviral RNAi response. The observation that a viral protein called VP35, which is used by the Ebola and Marburg viruses to suppress RNAi, suggests that RNAi may also be active against those dangerous pathogens and other viruses that utilized RNA as their genetic code or in their replication cycle.

"We now need to assess more directly the role of antiviral RNAi in human infectious diseases caused by RNA viruses – which include Ebola, West Nile and Zika along with influenza – and how harnessing or boosting the antiviral RNAi response could be used to reduce the severity of these infections," says Jeffrey, who is an assistant professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. "Bringing the expertise of Dr. Ding's team, which specializes in the RNAi biology of lower organisms, together with my group that specializes in mammalian immunology was a perfect match." The teams will continue to work together to investigate some of these questions.

###

The co-lead authors of the Nature Microbiology paper are Yang Li, Jinfeng Lu and Shu-Wei Dong, University of California, Riverside; and Megha Basavappa, Massachusetts General Hospital. Additional co-authors are Alexander Cronkite, John Prior, Hans-Christian Reinecker and Sihem Cheloufi, MGH; Yanhong Han, Wan-Xiang Li and Fedor Karginov, UC Riverside; and Paul Hertzog, Hudson Institute of Medical Research, Victoria, Australia. Support for the study includes National Institutes of Health grants R01 AI107087, R01 AI52447 and R56 AI110579.

Massachusetts General Hospital, founded in 1811, is the original and largest teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. The MGH Research Institute conducts the largest hospital-based research program in the nation, with an annual research budget of more than $800 million and major research centers in HIV/AIDS, cardiovascular research, cancer, computational and integrative biology, cutaneous biology, human genetics, medical imaging, neurodegenerative disorders, regenerative medicine, reproductive biology, systems biology, photomedicine and transplantation biology. The MGH topped the 2015 Nature Index list of health care organizations publishing in leading scientific journals and earned the prestigious 2015 Foster G. McGaw Prize for Excellence in Community Service. In August 2016 the MGH was once again named to the Honor Roll in the U.S. News & World Report list of "America's Best Hospitals."

Media Contact

Noah Brown
[email protected]
617-643-3907
@MassGeneralNews

http://www.mgh.harvard.edu

############

Story Source: Materials provided by Scienmag

Share12Tweet7Share2ShareShareShare1

Related Posts

Five or more hours of smartphone usage per day may increase obesity

July 25, 2019
IMAGE

NASA’s terra satellite finds tropical storm 07W’s strength on the side

July 25, 2019

NASA finds one burst of energy in weakening Depression Dalila

July 25, 2019

Researcher’s innovative flood mapping helps water and emergency management officials

July 25, 2019
Please login to join discussion

POPULAR NEWS

  • blank

    Microbe Computers

    59 shares
    Share 24 Tweet 15
  • A pioneering study from Politecnico di Milano sheds light on one of the still poorly understood aspects of cancer

    35 shares
    Share 14 Tweet 9
  • Fossil spines reveal deep sea’s past

    34 shares
    Share 14 Tweet 9
  • Scientists go ‘back to the future,’ create flies with ancient genes to study evolution

    75 shares
    Share 30 Tweet 19

About

We bring you the latest biotechnology news from best research centers and universities around the world. Check our website.

Follow us

Recent News

New study will examine irritable bowel syndrome as long COVID symptom

True progression or pseudoprogression in glioblastoma patients?

Neural activity associated with motor commands changes depending on context

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Oops! It seems you have several subscriptions pending confirmation. You can confirm or unsubscribe some from the Subscriptions Manager before adding more.

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 56 other subscribers
  • Contact Us

Bioengineer.org © Copyright 2023 All Rights Reserved.

No Result
View All Result
  • Homepages
    • Home Page 1
    • Home Page 2
  • News
  • National
  • Business
  • Health
  • Lifestyle
  • Science

Bioengineer.org © Copyright 2023 All Rights Reserved.

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password?

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In