Scientists at Umeå University in Sweden report that they can now show how the poliovirus behaves when it takes over an infected cell and tricks the cell into producing new virus particles. Polio was thought to be almost eradicated, but infection has now been rediscovered in London and New York.
“We now have a completely different understanding of how the virus acts and thus better opportunities for research to perhaps find new ways to curb the virus’ progress in the future,” said Lars-Anders Carlson, PhD, in the university’s department of medical chemistry and biophysics, whose group, which included collaborators at the U.S. National Institutes of Health and Monash University in Australia, published its study “Membrane-assisted assembly and selective secretory autophagy of enteroviruses” in Nature Communications.
