These rapid shifts mean that researchers are still trying to understand a multitude of viral proteins and precisely how they increase viruses' infecting abilities-; knowledge that could be crucial for developing new or better virus-fighting treatments. Now, a team of scientists at Gladstone Institutes and the Innovative Genomics Institute led by Jennifer Doudna, PhD, have harnessed computational tools to predict the three-dimensional shapes of nearly 70,000 viral proteins. The researchers matched the 3D shapes to the structures of proteins whose functions are already known.
Because the structure of a protein directly contributes to its biological function, their study provides new insights into what, exactly, these lesser-known proteins do. Among their other findings, published in the journal Nature , the researchers discovered a powerful way that viruses evade immune systems. In fact, they found that bacteria-infecting viruses and those that infect higher organisms-; including humans-; share a similar, ancient mechanism to evade host immune defenses.
As viruses with pandemic potential emerge, it's important to establish how they'll interact with human cells. Our new study provides a tool to predict what those newly emerging viruses can do." Jennifer Doudna, PhD, Professor, University of California Berkeley Sequence versus shape Typically, to figure out the function of a protein, researchers will look for similarities between its distinct sequence of amino-acid "building bloc.