The Zika Virus Has a Mug Shot

Scientists have put a face on the Zika virus. Using new technology that allows researchers to peer at objects on the scale of an atom, researchers at Purdue University have revealed what the mysterious Zika virus looks like. They published their work Thursday in the journal Science. Why is this important? Well, for one thing, it’s just cool, says senior study author Richard J. Kuhn, PhD, who directs Purdue’s Institute for Inflammation, Immunology and Infectious Disease.

“It’s really good to be able to see what’s causing the problem, right? So seeing the virus, more than anything else, answers some basic curiosities about, ‘What does this thing actually look like?” he says.

But there’s another reason the discovery is so essential.. Knowing the virus’ structure is a little bit like having a Lego piece to play with. It allows scientists to build models to understand how Zika attaches to and sneaks into cells. It can also help them look for drugs that might keep the virus from infecting cells.

“It provides a foundation,” Kuhn says. “It begins to give us some ideas of how we might be able to intervene with the virus.”

Here are all the geeky details:

• The virus is an icosahedron—a ball with 20 triangular facets or faces.
• A single virus particle is 50 nanometers in size, which is super small and kind of average for a virus. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter. To get an idea how tiny that is, a sheet of paper is about 100,000 nanometers thick.
  Fingernails grow at a nanometer a second.
• The structure of the Zika virus is remarkably similar to its cousin, dengue virus. Yet they cause very different diseases. So right away, Kuhn says he and his team are trying to figure out why that is. He said so far, one of the key characteristics he’s seen involves chains of sugars that stick out from the surface of one of the viruses’ proteins. (They’re marked in red in the picture.) Dengue has two of these chains, while the Zika virus only has one. That probably allows the virus to infect different kinds of cells, Kuhn says.

The next steps, Kuhn says, will be to see what kind of proteins, called antibodies, the body’s immune system makes to fight the virus. Understanding that, he said, could speed the development of drugs and vaccines that would protect people from the disease.