Editor’s Selections: Sex and mosquitoes, zoonoses are not a one-way street, and beyond the bacterial microcompartment
April 15th, 2011 Editor's Selections 2 CommentsVincent Racaniello selects several notable posts each week from molecular and cellular biology and virology. He unravels viruses at virology blog.
- Zika virus is a flavivirus that is usually spread by a mosquito vector. In an unsual case of husband to wife transmission, no mosquito was involved – possibly the virus was acquired by sexual activity.
- The presence of Helicobacter pylori in the stomach is key in the development of gastric cancer and peptic ulcer disease. Transmission of the bacterium from humans might have caused a disease outbreak in a colony of Stripe-faced Dunnarts.
- Bacterial nanocompartments are thin, icosahedral protein shells, built with a single protein, that enclose a specific protein payload. Whether they originated from viruses or bacteria is unknown.
I’ll be back next Friday with more selections.