Zika's Neural Targets

Zika virus is a blood-borne pathogen, transmitted mainly by mosquitoes. The recent spread of the virus from Brazil to Central America and the southern United States, has led to a flurry of research into the biology of the virus, particularly into how it causes microcephaly – an unusually small brain and skull – in babies born to infected mothers. It's known that Zika infects neural progenitor cells (pictured), which give rise to the brain. But new research shows the virus also attacks neural crest cells. These cells lie adjacent to neural progenitors during development and influence the formation of both brain and skull. Zika infection of neural crest cells causes them to, among other things, secrete factors that either kill the neural progenitors or force them to differentiate prematurely – identified by the presence of neuronal projections (red). Zika thus appears to drive microcephaly by infecting a combination of neural cell types.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

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Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

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• Image from work by Nicholas L. Bayless and Rachel S. Greenberg, and colleagues
• Stanford School of Medicine, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
• Image copyright Elsevier 2016
• Published in Cell Host & Microbe, October 2016