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What was special about ZIKV? Although it was first identified in 1947, the world first came to be aware of Zika virus (ZIKV) during the 2015 epidemics in South America, where 1.5 million people were infected, and a surge of cases of microcephaly and congenital Zika...

Towards a universal influenza vaccine Is a universal influenza vaccine on the horizon? In this week’s virology post, drawing on an excellent recent review by Sautto et al. (Virology Journal), we highlight some of the innovative approaches being used in attempts to...

The antivirus inside you Infected cells often die. Either they are killed by the infecting virus itself, or they initiate controlled auto-destruction mechanisms (e.g., apoptosis) to prevent the infecting virus from replicating further. Fortunately, our body can...

The virus inside you Since the origin of life on Earth, species have exploited each other, and viruses have proven themselves to be particularly efficient at this. However, new discoveries are revealing how viruses and microbes have helped in the building of the...

It’s the virus, stupid (?) Direct acting antivirals (DAAs) are among the most successful drugs ever developed. It is thanks to DAAs that HIV is no longer a death sentence, and we can now clear hepatitis C virus from many chronically infected patients. Unfortunately,...

Engineered Influenza Virus as a Weapon Against Cancer What if a virus could be used to selectively replicate in – and kill – cancer cells, without harming the normal tissues? Some researchers are aiming to do exactly this by genetically engineering oncolytic viruses...

Do vaccines spread? A live attenuated vaccine is effectively still a virus, and as such it shares with viruses the ability to spread. This is an important and often overlooked concept that is covered with much clarity by Bull, Smithson and Nuismer in Trends in...

Vaccine Research: Then and Now If life expectancy has greatly increased in the past century, this is largely due to vaccines, which, according to the WHO, save 6 million people from death each year. This terrific success, unfortunately, has led many to forget about...

How to survive a phenotypic antiviral screening Antiviral screening is a powerful tool to identify new compounds and therapeutic targets against viruses. Traditionally, an antiviral screening targets a viral protein critical for replication and uses high-throughput in...

Six useful viral qRT-PCR tips Quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR) is a sensitive and accurate method for detecting viruses in samples, or to test for transcript variation in infected cells. However, some viruses might add additional levels of trickiness to this...