In the Bowels of the Ebola Virus

Ensayo

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Diana Cáceres Chacón

In the bowels of the Ebola virus

The elongated worm-like aspect of the Ebola virus has already surprised Belgian scientists who discovered it in 1976, when they analyzed samples collected in their former colony, the Congo, near the Ebola River. Much more information about its structure is known today, and a team of Visual Science (Russia) infographers have compiled them to create one of the most detailed 3D models of the microorganism.

The infectious virion or virus particle is about 80 nanometers (nm) in diameter - fairly constant - and a variable length up to 1400 nm in length. It contains proteins encoded by the virus itself (drawn in the image in garnet tones) and structures captured to the host cell (in gray), as the human proteins used by the pathogen to form its own membrane. This is generated when the newly replicated virus leaves by budding the infected cell.

On its membrane, ebolavirus manufactures glycoproteins (GP), molecular tufts that serve to fix and enter its next victims. These GPs are similar to those of the AIDS virus and, as in that case, also focus the attention of numerous scientific studies to neutralize them with possible vaccines.

Several layers of proteins, such as VP40 and VP24, are distributed inside the virion, which act during budding; Or VP35 and VP30, which activate transcription and confront the interferon that our immune system produces to fight pathogens.

The spiral structure that appears in the center is a nucleocapsule formed by its RNA - the virus of the Ebola does not have DNA - and the protein NP that helps to pack it in the form of propeller. The image also shows the polymerase or protein L, responsible for the synthesis of RNA, the authentic software that organizes the microorganism.

This 3D infographics, which received an honorable mention in 2012 by Science magazine and is now back to top, includes 11 types of human proteins and virus, 18,900 nucleotides of its RNA genome and more than 2.5 million Lipid molecules. The model is based on X-ray analysis and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, as well as on virological information published in the last decades.

CONCLUSION

The article mainly refers to the particulate viral ebola from which it is possible to photograph and to make moelos of the same in 3d helping these scientists to know more about it, such as its morphology, its composition, its form of reproduction and infection that uses said Viral organism to infect the organism in question.

http://biotech-spain.com/files/media/image/articles/2014/10/original/747ebola-virus.jpg

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