The researchers published their findings in the Aug. 18 issue of the journal Nature in a paper titled, Animal virus replication and RNAi-mediated antiviral silencing in C. elegans.
UCR Professor of Plant Pathology Shou-Wei Ding co-authored the paper with Morris Maduro, assistant professor of biology; Feng Li, a graduate student in microbiology; Rui Lu and Hongwei Li, postdoctoral researchers in Ding's laboratory; and research specialists Gina Broitman-Maduro and Wan-Xiang Li. Lu and Maduro are co-first authors of this Nature paper. The National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Agriculture supported the research.
The paper reflects a major step forward in the study of how some of the world's most virulent viruses, such as West Nile, SARS, Ebola and Hepatitis C interact with their hosts.
"All these viruses are very dangerous and are traditionally studied in animal models, so large-scale genetic studies of the host-virus interaction is very hard to do," said Ding, who works in the Center for Plant Cell Biology at UCR's Institute for Integrative Genome Biology. "Needless to say, we are all very excited to find that this little worm can be used to understand how hosts genetically control viruses."
For years researchers throughout the world have studied C. elegans because many aspects of its biology, such as genetics, development and the workings of neurons, mirror the biology of humans. However, no viruses were known to infect the millimeter-long roundworm so it was not used as a model for studying viral infections.
The Nature paper now shows that UC Riverside researchers have developed a strain of the worm, C. elegans, in which an animal virus could replicate, allowing them to map the delicate danc
'"/>
Contact: Ricardo Duran
ricardo.duran@ucr.edu
951-827-5893
University of California - Riverside
17-Aug-2005