Expression of a single gene lets scientists easily grow hepatitis C virus in the lab | Newswire

Worldwide, 185 million people have chronic hepatitis C. Since the late 1980s, when scientists discovered the virus that causes the infection, they have struggled to find ways to grow it in human cells in the lab — an essential part of learning how the virus works and developing new effective treatments.

In a study published in Nature on August 12, scientists led by The Rockefeller University’s Charles M. Rice, Maurice R. and Corinne P. Greenberg Professor in Virology and head of the Laboratory of Virology and Infectious Disease, report that when they overexpressed a particular gene in human liver cancer cell lines, the virus could easily replicate. This discovery allows study of naturally occurring forms of hepatitis C virus (HCV) in the lab.

A red flag: Researchers engineered cultured cells to contain a red marker that moves into the nucleus upon HCV infection. Nothing happened when normal cells were exposed to HCV (top), but when the researchers expressed the protein SEC14L2, some nuclei changed color from blue to purple (bottom).
“Being able to easily culture HCV in the lab has many important implications for basic science research,” says Rice. “There is still much we don’t understand about how the virus operates, and how it interacts with liver cells and the immune system.”

Hepatitis C virus graphic from Russell Kightley Media

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See on Scoop.it – Virology and Bioinformatics from Virology.ca