HSV-1
Snapshots of Life: New Target for Herpes Treatment?
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Something about this image reminds me of that wacky and infectious old song: “It was a one-eyed, one-horned, flyin’ purple people eater …” Of course, this purple blob isn’t a people eater, but it does happen to be infectious. What you see here is a 3D rendering of a protein that the herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1)—one of two herpes viruses that cause genital herpes and cold sores—depends upon to infect human cells.
When a cell is infected with HSV-1, the virus inserts its DNA into human cells, periodically coming out of dormancy to make more copies of itself. However, errors sometimes occur when the DNA is replicated. When that happens, an HSV-1 protein, dubbed infected cell protein 8 (ICP8), stitches broken pieces of DNA back together. That’s what you see depicted in this schematic, which shows two single strands of DNA (red with multicolor bases) entering an ICP8 complex (purplish blue) to be reannealed into DNA’s familiar double-stranded helix (red).
