Dengue virus structure solved

Dengue virus structure solved in two steps. In its nastiest form, mosquito-borne Dengue fever leads to hemorrhaging, coma, and death. Purdue University’s Richard Kuhn and his colleagues from Purdue and Caltech first used cryoelectron microscopy to derive the virus’s rough, 24-Å-resolution shape (for more on cryoEM, see Physics Today 0031-9228 52 3 1999 21  https://doi.org/10.1063/1.882609 March 1999, page 21 ). To get higher resolution, they assumed that the Dengue virus shares the same molecular building blocks as its relative, tick-borne encephalitis virus. The structure of these building blocks—glycoprotein dimers—had already been solved to atomic resolution, so the problem became how to arrange the glycoproteins to reproduce the cryoEM-derived Dengue structure. By using sophisticated image analysis, Kuhn and company verified the shared building block assumption and solved the structure of Dengue virus to a resolution of about 3Å (see figure). Armed with the structure, they also came up with a set...