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...
Skip Nav Destination
Article navigation
1 April 2002
April 01 2002
Citation
Charles Day; Dengue virus structure solved. Physics Today 1 April 2002; 55 (4): 9. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4796708
Download citation file:
PERSONAL SUBSCRIPTION
Purchase an annual subscription for $25. A subscription grants you access to all of Physics Today's current and backfile content.
Sign In
You could not be signed in. Please check your credentials and make sure you have an active account and try again.
30
Views
Citing articles via
The no-cloning theorem
William K. Wootters; Wojciech H. Zurek
Dense crowds follow their own rules
Johanna L. Miller
Focus on software, data acquisition, and instrumentation
Andreas Mandelis