Sturdy Viral Architecture

This illustration shows the most detailed structure to-date of a human enteric adenovirus – a primary causative agent of diarrhoea and diarrhoea-related deaths worldwide. Unlike other types of adenovirus, such as the ones that infect the respiratory tract or those that have been engineered to make vaccines, enteric ones are capable of withstanding the highly acidic environment of the stomach. The new structural details of the virus, which were obtained using cryogenic electron microscopy – an approach that provides near-atomic level resolution – reveal the specific features of the virus’s protein shell that provide this structural robustness. Excitingly, such insights may not only help to explain how the virus survives the stomach’s harsh conditions and infects gut cells, but also lead to the development of similarly sturdy adenovirus-based vaccines that could be taken by mouth rather than by injection.

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 by Karim Rafie, Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden
• and Department of Clinical Microbiology, Section of Virology, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden
• Image copyright held by the original authors
• Research published in Science Advances, January 2021