{"id":1313,"date":"2016-04-22T11:17:42","date_gmt":"2016-04-22T10:17:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/biosciences\/?p=1313"},"modified":"2016-04-22T11:17:42","modified_gmt":"2016-04-22T10:17:42","slug":"research-shows-potential-for-emergence-of-new-ebolavirus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/biosciences\/2016\/04\/22\/research-shows-potential-for-emergence-of-new-ebolavirus\/","title":{"rendered":"Research shows potential for emergence of new Ebolavirus"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"NAID<\/a><\/p>\n

A team from the University\u2019s School of Biosciences<\/a> examined the differences between Ebolaviruses that cause severe disease in humans and the Reston virus that does not.<\/p>\n

The Reston virus, which is known to circulate in domestic pigs in Asia and occasionally infect humans, is currently the only member of the Ebolavirus<\/a> family not to have been reported as causing life-threatening disease, including haemorrhagic fever in humans.<\/p>\n

Using computational analysis of the sequences of the genomes of Ebolaviruses and a computational prediction of the effects of sequence variations on virus function, the researchers, Dr Mark Wass<\/a>, Senior Lecturer in Computational Biology, Professor Martin Michaelis<\/a>, Professor of Molecular Medicine, and Dr Jeremy Rossman<\/a>, Lecturer in Virology, and their teams, identified characteristic differences in a number of virus proteins.<\/p>\n

The results suggested that only a few changes in one Ebolavirus protein, VP24, may be necessary to render the Reston virus into a virus that can cause human disease. There may be a risk therefore that Reston viruses acquire the few mutations necessary to cause disease in humans and to develop into a novel health threat.<\/p>\n

The research, entitled Conserved differences in protein sequence determine the human pathogenicity of Ebolaviruses <\/a>is published in Scientific Reports<\/a><\/p>\n

Ebola Virus<\/em> image NIAID<\/em><\/p>\n