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Have you wondered HOW or WHY a vegetable tests positive for COVID-19?
[search clip]
· Can Coronavirus Be Transmitted via Fresh Fruits and Vegetables?
http://www.msn.com/en-us/health/nutrition/can-corona…
“Mar 09, 2020 · In fact, a research study from 2013 on coronavirus in strawberries and lettuce found that the virus only survives on produce between four and 10 days”…
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The keyword above is “on” the produce as opposed to “in” the produce, suggesting outside contamination of CoV spreading in 2013. But a case of Tanzanian paw-paw fruit that tested CoV positive last May took the tack of faulty testing, even though goats tested with the same tool were also positive –animals test positive and develop covid, we’re told, just like people—and was accepted. But fruit?? A coronavirus gene sequence in fruit?– now, that just can’t be allowed.
It’s a wild story.
[search clip]
Faulty coronavirus tests suspected as fruit tests positive
nypost.com/2020/05/06/faulty-coronavirus-kits…
“May 06, 2020 · Coronavirus test kits have aroused suspicions in Salaam, Tanzania after results taken from goats and fruit came back positive in what the country’s leader has dubbed a “technical error.” https://nypost.com/2020/05/06/faulty-coronavirus-kits-suspected-as-goat-and-fruit-test-positive-in-tanzania/
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In Part One previously, I posted a 2005 vaccine research document that showed SARS-CoV antigen (the immune ‘provocation’ element) genetically embedded in tomato, tobacco, and potato plants as a plausible food vaccine that was demonstrated to be successful. The scientists wanted to show “that the plant system provides many practical, economic, and safety advantages compared with conventional systems… without injection-related hazards”…
That was 2005. Here’s the link again: https://www.pnas.org/content/102/25/9062
Despite an outcry against it be aware that food vaccines are coming back. Tobacco after all is a food, a “Feed The World” kind of nutrient-dense, protein-rich food source (see the previous post Planting Viruses) that has a lot of appeal over, say, worms and insects. It just isn’t a snack like a tomato or a pawpaw and that’s what’s coming back –the whack in your snack!
[search clip]
· GMO tomato as edible COVID vaccine? Mexican scientists work …
allianceforscience.cornell.edu/blog/2020/05/gmo…
“May 06, 2020 · The only similar work that can be found in the bibliography is the development of a tomato with SARS-CoV antigens, which was responsible for severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in Southeast Asian countries in 2002-2003 and has 70 percent genomic similarity to the pathogen behind the current pandemic”…
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In Part Two, here as you read, we’re going to look back at the small group of researchers who worked with Tobacco Mosaic Virus to discover it’s properties –its structural properties—and how they learned what constitutes “virus,” including the genetic makeup of its proteins, all from architectural models of structure. Revealed by X-rays, electron microscopes, mathematical algorithms, and cleverly designed cameras –the tech-heavy core of discovery– a simply-derived liquid ‘filtrate’ called “virus” was turned into building blocks of nanotechnology. The Tobacco Mosaic Virus (TMV) today is both a tool and a medium for redesigning biology.
The group, which I’ll call the ‘Structure Group’, has in its members some of the most renown scientists of modern history; Watson & Crick and their Nobel-winning colleague Maurice Wilkins who won their Prize for modeling the structure of DNA; Rosalind Franklin who supplied them with the graphs to prove it; and John Desmond (J.D.) Bernal, the genius who showed them the way. The art and artifice of the Structure Group in London created a cultish destination point of pilgrimage, a Mecca of methods where eager young protein chemists vied for a place. Many of them are still living and teaching today, responsible for the ‘classic’ images of viruses I’ll be showing you in this post.
…Such as…
A Comparison Example: Turnip Crinkle Virus (TCV) is one of a half-dozen plant viruses we’ll look at that were analyzed by students of the London Structure Group. It’s identical to a number of human viruses; poliovirus, rhinovirus, Norwalk virus, and more. Dr. Jim Hogle signed his name (with lab colleagues) to the TCV image ‘map’ below. We’ll meet Jim Hogle briefly in this work as a polio researcher at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla CA, a neighbor facility to the (Jonas) Salk Institute and campus of UCSD in northern San Diego.
Turnip Crinkle Virus (TCV), image source https://www.rcsb.org/structure/3zx8
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and this: Tomato Bushy Stunt Virus (TBSV), identical and structurally ‘solved’ by the same friendly small group of students under tutelage by the Structure Group ****************************************************************************************
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*And before I change the subject away from food-borne virus, the U.S. government says that Norwalk virus is the most common viral contaminant on fruits and vegetables.
*Norwalk Virus*
Norwalk virus is structurally alike to Turnip Crinkle and Tomato Bushy Stunt viruses, at least by protein analysis methods, which teaches that surface (capsid) proteins of these “macromolecules” can turn, twist inward, and project outward on “protein hinges”, exposing different amino acids (proteins) on their surfaces with or without changing their gene sequences. They can move, in other words, subject to something acting upon them. Mutants, which occur naturally, or deliberately, and easily from very minor or single alterations of chemistry, can signify a gene change as well as a surface protein shape change.
Part Two will also endeavor to define “virus” in a greater context. Tobacco Mosaic Virus was the first ever created with a scientific purpose, credited to Dmitri Ivanofsky, a Russian botanist who was sent to investigate a failing tobacco crop in the Ukraine. In the late 1880s, Ivanofsky mashed his diseased leaf samples together, added water, and ‘purified’ the liquid through an ultrafine filter. For decades to follow, indiscriminate liquid filtrate from disease specimens has been called “virus”. If you had a polio vaccine as a child, the viral component was likely to have originated by this method:
Poliovirus: procured as described
“Materials and Methods
“Virus.–The Lansing strain of poliomyelitis virus used for this study was obtained from Armstrong (2) September 27, 1950, in the form of an infected mouse brain and cord representing the 379th mouse passage [through the brains of others]. It was passed twice through cotton rats in this laboratory. The second passage material was homogenized to a 20 per cent suspension in distilled water with the aid of a Waring blendor and served as a stock pool”…
Document source: “THE INTRACELLULAR DISTRIBUTION OF LANSING POLIOMYELITIS VIRUS IN THE CENTRAL NERVOUS SYSTEM OF INFECTED COTTON RATS* BY CARLTON E. SCHWERDT, I~.D., ANO ARTHUR B. PARDEE, PH.D. (From the Virus Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley) (Received for publication, April 25, 1952)”
https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.274.2913&rep=rep1&type=pdf
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Recent news on Polio, issued August 2013
An article by Scientific American.
“Global eradication of polio has been the ultimate game of Whack-a-Mole for the past decade; when it seems the virus has been beaten into submission in a final refuge, up it pops in a new region. Now, as vanquishing polio worldwide appears again within reach, another insidious threat may be in store from infection sources hidden in plain view. Polio’s latest redoubts are “chronic excreters,” people with compromised immune systems who, having swallowed weakened polioviruses in an oral vaccine as children, generate and shed live viruses from their intestines and upper respiratory tracts for years. Healthy children react to the vaccine by developing antibodies that shut down viral replication, thus gaining immunity to infection. But chronic excreters cannot quite complete that process and instead churn out a steady supply of viruses. The oral vaccine’s weakened viruses can mutate and regain wild polio’s hallmark ability to paralyze the people it infects. After coming into wider awareness in the mid-1990s, the condition shocked researchers.”
https://www.nature.com/news/the-hidden-threat-that-could-prevent-polio-s-global-eradication-1.13557
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“Watson began working on tobacco mosaic virus (TMV), which contains a nucleic acid called RNA. He hoped that his studies would help him eventually learn about DNA. Watson began learning how to make X-ray crystallography images in order to try to show that TMV had helically stacked protein”…
“In 1952 he determined the structure of the protein coat surrounding the tobacco mosaic virus but made no dramatic progress with DNA. Suddenly, in the spring of 1953, Watson saw that the essential DNA components—four organic bases—must be linked in definite pairs.” https://www.britannica.com/biography/James-Dewey-Watson
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Tobacco Mosaic and Polio viruses were the ultimate study objects of the London Structure Group when Rosalind Franklin joined the Birkbeck College Lab (Univ. of London) in 1953 on the invitation of J.D. Bernal. In those pursuits, thanks to the intrepid networking of Franklin as history records it, an intimate partnership was forged with the University of California Berkeley. Carlton E. Schwerdt, cited above with his polio mouse-brain virus, sent his wife Patsy from San Francisco to Birkbeck carrying a sealed vial of poliovirus crystals in her purse for the exclusive study of the Structure Group. The polio crystals sent by Schwerdt to Birkbeck, however, were the Mahoney strain of poliovirus considered deadly and the cause of the “Cutter Incident” which suspended the original Salk IPV until ‘fixed’.
UCBerkeley, many biology historians will tell you, was the seed-point of modern virology as the academic home of Wendell Stanley who created the Virus Laboratory (Stanley Hall) after his prize-winning accomplishment of crystallizing Tobacco Mosaic Virus (1935), thus opening the way. Crick & Watson’s ‘DNA’ colleague, physicist Maurice Wilkins, spent his time on the Manhattan Project at the Berkeley Virus Lab with Wendell Stanley– and Stanley became a constant friend and asset to the Group.
For as much as the Manhattan Project was a joint British-American enterprise, the spread and control of tobacco was it’s larger and historical counterpart. No entity on the planet would possibly benefit more (excepting the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation & co.) if tobacco could ‘Feed the World,’ or feed-and-vaccinate the world, than the British American Tobacco corporation –the BAT in your Covid soup. British American Tobacco is the contractor for DARPA’s tobacco corona vaccine. ( See ‘Tobacco Vaccines, by DARPA )
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The Movie, Race For The Double Helix, the 1987 British-made film (originally titled ‘Life Story’), is a mostly fair account of discovering the structure of DNA –with a few omissions. Tobacco Mosaic Virus gets a mention, if you can catch it, when Jim Watson (Jeff Goldblum) says, misleadingly, “maybe I should study Tobacco Mosaic Virus, but it’s not DNA”. Watson did in fact study and attempt TMV crystallography without the needed quality results. What Crick and Watson really needed were Rosalind Franklin’s pictures, photograph #51 to be precise, which she called the ‘B’ form –a diffraction grid pattern showing two helical chains. Franklin’s TMV samples had from one to four internal ‘strand’ helices by her evidence. The photo(s) and notes were stolen from her lab and passed to the men by Max Perutz, Francis Crick’s doctoral supervisor at the Cavendish who was himself supervised for his PhD by J.D. Bernal. By then Bernal had already arranged (since March 1952) for Franklin to leave Cambridge (King’s College, and Cavendish Lab at U. Cambridge) and join him at Birkbeck (U. London, across town) to work on TMV.
Worth the watch: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_race_for_the_double_helix
Max Perutz ultimately won his own Nobel Prize standing with Crick & Watson in 1962. (left-to-right; F.Crick, M.Wilkins, John Steinbeck, J.Watson, Max Perutz and John Kendrew)
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*Advisors on the movie included Aaron Klug and John T. Finch who were Rosalind Franklin’s own assistants and doctoral students: the two Structure Group members who remained at the hub of Birkbeck, collaborating together for more than forty years and training students of their own (and others) from around the world. Max Perutz and John Kendrew maintained ties with the Birbeck Structure Group (as did Crick and Watson) winning their Nobel together for the structure of hemoglobin and myoglobin.
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“ ‘Rosy, of course, did not directly give us her data. For that matter, no one at King’s realized they were in our hands,’ Watson admitted.” https://medium.com/s/the-matilda-effect/rosalind-franklin-dna-matilda-8c54e6222848
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Nobel winner Wendell Stanley became “the father of virology”
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* Quote attributed to Francis Crick: “Any child could make a virus”
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The Structure Group, Birkbeck College U.London
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Lab leaders J.D. Bernal (beg,1937) and Aaron Klug (beg.1958)
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Aaron Klug
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John Desmond ‘J.D.’ Bernal (b1901-d1971) graduated from Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge (London) in 1922 at the age of 21 with a degree in mathematics. From there he was sponsored at the Royal Society’s Faraday Laboratory by William Henry Bragg to learn the art of crystallography (X-ray diffraction physics) and was set to work for the British government studying the structure of graphite. In 1927, he returned to Cambridge as a lecturer in crystallography and by 1934 was made assistant director of the Cavendish Lab. Bernal began studying organic molecules at the Cavendish; oestrin and cholesterol (1929); vitamin B1 and liquid water (1933); pepsin(1934), vitamin D2 (1935) and Tobacco Mosaic Virus in 1937. His doctoral students included Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, who became his confidant and lover, Alan Mackay and Max Perutz. His nickname in these years became ‘Sage’. Denied a fellowship at the Cavendish in 1937 by Ernest Rutherford, Bernal was invited to Birkbeck, University of London, where he assumed the laboratory developed by Patrick Blackett and moved into the apartment upstairs. He was honored with membership in the Royal Society. After the war, Bernal’s lab expanded to become the Biomolecular Research Laboratory (BRL), set up in two buildings on the University’s Torrington Square, becoming in the process an arm of the British government’s Medical Research Council (MRC). The spirited atmosphere of Birkbeck under Bernal’s influence led to a continuously dynamic interplay of politics and science carried on nightly among students and visitors. Bernal is remembered for his war work (advising heads-of-state and planning for D-Day), his devotion to Soviet communism (which caused ‘distancing’ from his peers in the mid-fifties) and his legacy of books and articles.
“His first adult visit to the USA (his mother was a bilingual English and French speaking American, but he was educated in Ireland and England) was curtailed by the outbreak of World War II in 1939. Post-1945, many of Sage’s visits to the USSR and Eastern Europe (several of whose scientific academies awarded him Membership) and to China and India included both scientific lectures and peace campaigning. He met Khrushchev, Mao Zedong and Nehru, gave a demonstration to Churchill, and participated in committee meetings in the White House, the Kremlin and 10 Downing Street. His experience of less developed countries began with laborious and uncomfortable war-time travel for Mountbatten but thereafter he made many lengthy tours to countries with emerging economies to advise on the development of each nation’s science… Perhaps Bernal’s greatest scientific contribution was to nurture a clutch of Nobel prizewinners in the development of molecular biology”…. https://www.iucr.org/news/newsletter/volume-15/number-1/book-review
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Aaron Klug (b1926-d2018), born in Lithuania and raised in South Africa, Klug arrived at Cambridge in 1951 to work on his PhD (rec’d 1953). He went to Birkbeck to study Tobacco Mosaic Virus with Rosalind Franklin, along with John T. Finch. Klug and Finch were key investigators of the plant viruses when the lab ‘took a step’ to poliovirus obtained from UCBerkeley. A peak moment for their small group was the creation and display of ‘person-sized’ models of TMV and poliovirus made for the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels Belgium. Rosalind Franklin died in the midst of these preaparations –Klug tookover her work and the operational leadership of the lab. In 1962 he received a teaching fellowship at Cambridge and relocated his academic base with the headquarters of the Medical Research Council, maintaining his ties with Birkbeck, especially in course of Bernal’s deteriorating illness brought on by a series of strokes. In 1969 Krug was made a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1982 he won a Nobel Prize for advancements in crystallographic electron microscopy. Queen Elizabeth II knighted him in 1988 –this one year after the tele-broadcast of “Race For The Double Helix”– and in 1995 he became President of the Royal Society. In Israel, where he was a frequent visitor, Ben Gurion University named an institution for him in 2013, the Aaron Klug Integrated Center for Biomolecular Structure.
“His certificate of election to [president of] the Royal Society reads:
Mathematical physicist and crystallographer distinguished for his contributions to molecular biology, especially the structure of viruses. Development of a theory of simultaneous temperature and phase changes in steels led him to apply related mathematical methods to the problem of diffusion and chemical reactions of gases in thin layers of haemoglobin solutions and in red blood cells. Then the late Rosalind Franklin introduced him to the x-ray study of tobacco mosaic virus to which he contributed by his application and further development of Cochran and Crick‘s theory of diffraction from helical chain molecules. Klug’s most important work is concerned with the structure of spherical viruses. Together with D. Caspar he developed a general theory of spherical shells built up of a regular array of asymmetric particles. Klug and his collaborators verified the theory by x-ray and electron microscope studies, thereby revealing new and hitherto unsuspected features of virus structure.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Klug
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Don Casper, who co-developed the “Caspar-Klug” theory of structure was a career collaborator and visitor to the Structure Group.
“Caspar completed his BA in physics from Cornell University in 1950. He joined Yale University from where he earned his PhD in biophysics in 1955.[1] He was supervised by Ernest C. Pollard. His thesis was on the structure of tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) titled The Radial Structure of Tobacco Mosaic Virus. While waiting for his degree he worked under Max Delbrück at the California Institute of Technology as post doctoral student.[5] He worked with James D. Watson, with whom he had close professional association throughout his career. After receiving his PhD, he went to England having been awarded a fellowship at King’s College London under Rosalind Franklin and during 1955–1956 worked with her at Birkbeck College in London. Their meeting was fruitful both personally and professionally. He remained one of Franklin’s closest friends during her brief lifetime. In 1956 he and Franklin published individual but complementary papers in the March 10 issue of Nature, together showing that TMV was a hollow rod, rather than a solid structure as generally believed. They also demonstrated that RNA in TMV was wound along the inner surface of the hollow virus…” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Caspar
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“Kenneth Holmes was born in London in 1934… He obtained his B.A. at St. Johns College, Cambridge. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1959 at Birkbeck College London working on the structure of tobacco mosaic virus with Rosalind Franklin (officially supervised by JD Bernal). Tragically, Franklin died during this period and the work was completed with Aaron Klug… After a post-doc (1960-61) at Childrens’ Hospital Boston, with Don Caspar where he also started to work on muscle structure with Carolyn Cohen, he returned to the newly opened Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. Here he developed methods and X-ray optics for the analysis of structures by X-ray fibre diffraction. He worked with Aaron Klug on the structure of tobacco mosaic virus… In 1968 he moved to Heidelberg to open the Department of Biophysics at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research where he remained as director until his retirement in 2003. During this time he completed the structure of tobacco mosaic virus…” https://www.mr.mpg.de/emeritusgruppen/biophysik/holmes/curriculum_vitae#:~:text=After%20a%20post-doc%20%281960-61%29%20at%20Childrens%E2%80%99%20Hospital%20Boston%2C,the%20analysis%20of%20structures%20by%20X-ray%20fibre%20diffraction.
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Rosalind Franklin and her three assistants (Klug, Holmes, and Finch) were funded by the Agricultural Research Council – Holmes was assigned to work on the structure of TMV for his PhD while Klug and Finch investigated additional plant viruses. In all, they produced 17 papers on TMV. In October 1957, with funding from the U.S. (Public Health Service and NIH) they began the study of poliovirus.
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John T. Finch –“John’s first project on TYMV [turnip yellow mosaic virus] was technically demanding because of the very large unit cell (700 Å), then the largest that had been studied… Comparing the patterns from the full and empty particles, they showed that the protein coat was likely to have icosahedral symmetry, with the nucleic acid having lower symmetry (4), in accord with earlier suggestions about the symmetry of the coats of small spherical viruses (Crick & Watson 1956). At the time it was not feasible to take the analysis to high resolution by X-ray diffraction, so John later turned to electron microscopy to study TYMV.
…At the Birkbeck lab… Finch’s “second PhD project involved crystals of poliovirus, which were given to Rosalind in 1957 by Drs Schaffer and Schwerdt from Berkeley… [P]olio was still a scourge in the 1950s. However, Sir Lawrence Bragg (FRS 1921), director of the Royal Institution, was very interested in the project and he allowed John to continue to use the X-ray set up there, even though the containment facilities were no better than at Birkbeck. Aaron wrote out a protocol for storing and handling the crystals, which were transferred to the School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, across the road from Birkbeck. John mounted them there and then took them to the Royal Institution for X-raying. Only crystals mounted in [glass] capillaries could be brought into the laboratory, with adequate supplies of neutralizing formaldehyde close by in case of accidents. The members of the group were vaccinated against polio with the newly available Salk vaccine. X-ray exposures were long, sometimes overnight, and, as someone had to be in attendance, John remembered the nighttime Royal Institution as an eerie place… The study showed that poliovirus was rather similar to the small, spherical plant viruses also being worked on then, but the analysis was not taken any further.” https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbm.2018.0028
*(Mrs. Carlton Schwerdt, Patsy, hand-carried the crystal poliovirus from San Francisco to London in her purse)
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Poliovirus was not just “rather similar to the small, spherical plant viruses” –it was identical, and the ‘next generation’ of protein crystallographers trained under this group and their associates would have to learn it for themselves.
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Learning about the identical structure of the small (but ‘macromolecule’) plant viruses and poliovirus came as a “surprise” to crystallographer Michael G. Rossmann, who was convinced by his ‘team’ crystallography expert, Roland Rueckert, not to compete with his friend and colleague Jim Hogle studying poliovirus 1 (the Mahoney strain). The Mahoney strain makes the best crystals, but it is also considered highly virulent, paralyzing 80% of those infected with it. No infections at the laboratories handling the Mahoney strain (in this work) have ever been recorded. The Mahoney type 1 poliovirus was collected in 1941 from the pooled feces of three children of the Mahoney family who were ‘asymptomatic’ during an outbreak in the Cleveland Ohio area.
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Poliovirus type1 Mahoney strain
Source: http://www.virology.wisc.edu/virusworld/viruslist.php?virus=p1m
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GRASP (project) computer-generated video of rotating poliovirus1 http://www.virology.wisc.edu/virusworld/viruslist.php?virus=p1m#youtube
More elaborate video of poliovirus1(Mahoney) modeling structure, movement, and antiviral drug ‘entry’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBDKmDS734E&feature=emb_logo
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*During most of the 1970s, Michael Rossmann studied Southern Bean Mosaic Virus, although he was eager to work on a human pathogen. He was persuaded to study human rhinoviruses and picked rhinovirus #14.
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*Southern Bean Mosaic Virus (SBMV), with two views*
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Michael Rossmann –‘MR’– gave an Oral History to Sondra Schlesinger –‘SS’– of Washington University St. Louis in February of 1999. Here’s an edited excerpt:
SS. Let’s spend a little more time on southern bean mosaic virus, because that was really the first time you really had a structure to look at.
MR It was the second virus structure.
SS What you said was that it told you more about evolution than about function.
MR It told us about evolution but then when I started to learn the graphics – I spent a half a year studying the graphics – I worked out all the structural relationships …and of course this was published in a paper..[where] I go into great detail about the way the T=3 symmetry works. And the T=3 symmetry doesn’t actually work quite like Caspar and Klug predicted, but it roughly works. There are deviations and what is accurate and what is inaccurate, what is quasi and what is not quasi. I worked all this out for southern bean mosaic virus…
About that time…in 1980 I went to the Strasbourg International Conference of Virology. I had the opportunity to talk with Roland Rueckert . We were not that far away [from] each other in America but we had to go all the way to France to talk and we decided to combine our projects on rhinovirus. Actually, even before, Aaron Klug had shown that poliovirus crystallizes and so I had Sherin Abdel-Meguid, a post doc with me go to Ellie Ehrenfeld’s lab in Salt Lake City to start working on poliovirus. Of course Jim Hogle was working on poliovirus too and so Roland said you really shouldn’t compete like that. Roland was quite right because we had no idea or very little idea that rhino and polio viruses would be so similar.
SS Maybe this is really hindsight but since you had just found that southern bean mosaic virus and tomato bushy stunt virus were similar, it couldn’t have been quite as surprising to expect polio and rhino to be similar.
MR No, No, in fact, when we did solve rhino virus – it is very, very similar to southern bean mosaic virus – the only difference is that southern bean and tomato bushy stunt have 3 identical subunits A, B and C. In the picornaviruses [rhino and polio,ie ] A is VP1, B is VP3 and C is VP2.
SS I would have thought you would have expected rhino and polio to be similar.
MR No. we really didn’t. But something did happen. Our first crystals, not very good, of rhino virus were actually pseudo-isomorphous to Aaron Klug’s crystals of polio. Then we realized, although we could never do much with those crystals, they weren’t very good. Then we realized there would be a relationship, but not before that. Maybe we were just stupid. Maybe you would have realized [it] as a virologist.
SS No, I think it’s hindsight in a sense…
SS In fact, let’s go back to Francis Crick, we all use the example that he and Watson made about viruses being composed of identical subunits. Did that influence your thinking at all?
MR Yes! Definitely. That was the reason why I wanted to study viruses. They are ideal for molecular replacement.
SS Because they are identical?
MR We didn’t know how identical. Lots of people argued with us.
SS So now we’re just about ready to start with rhinovirus. You had chosen them partly because of your discussions with Roland?
MR Yes and he was extremely helpful…
SS How did you choose which rhinovirus to work on?
MR Roland made that decision. He rightly wanted a rhino virus that was easy to propagate that could be propagated in quantity. He looked into what was a good serotype for that and it was rhino 14…
[end excerpt, page 9 on WORD pagination] http://virologyhistory.wustl.edu/rossmann.htm
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*computer model rhinovirus showing receptors* https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/249476/view 
*model rhinovirus with antibodies attached * https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/249477/view 
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[excerpt2]
MR…Now what we did for rhino virus was to extend from 6 angstroms, where the map was just nothing really to 3.5 angstrom resolution and the map changed from nothing to something which we could interpret very quickly and we must have got to this on some early date in April [1985]. … we printed out the map and we stacked the map – that took all day… I started looking at it in the evening and, before it was too long into the night, I had been able to trace the VP1 chain and there was some helpful data from Roland and Barbara Sherry about mutations which were involved in binding antibodies and these should be on the surface …and I think it was by the end of that 2nd day [which]..was a Tuesday that we had placed all the amino acids of VP1, 2 and 3. VP1 I had done in the evening [before] and then we did VP2 and VP3 the next day. It was a very, very good map… You might have had 30 steps, I’m not quite sure of the exact number, in going from 6 angstroms to 3.5 and at each step you do many cycles and each cycle takes a long time. It was a big computer operation in which we had made a mistake halfway through and had to backtrack. We wasted about 2 weeks in that but I knew when I saw that 3.5 angstrom map that it was an incredibly good map.
SS At that time what was the resolution for southern bean mosaic virus?
MR About 3 angstoms. The other thing which we realized in those two days was that the structure [of rhinovirus 14] was like southern bean mosaic virus, that VP1 corresponded to the A subunit, VP2 to the C subunit and so on- and that was an immediate realization. Actually, Jim Hogle was working on polio at that time at Scripps in La Jolla and I visited him on a number of occasions. He called me just before lunch so I couldn’t go out with the rest of the lab and by the time the lab got back I was still on the phone. One thing I remember very clearly, I was describing to Jim the structure and I was assuming that Jim had realized this would be like tomato bushy stunt and turnip crinkle which he had worked on in Steve Harrison’ lab and suddenly I realized that Jim didn’t understand what I was saying. I said, ‘Jim, this is like tomato bushy stunt and southern bean mosaic virus.’
[end excerpt, p14]
- James M. Hogle
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The upshot of Michael Rossmann’s long phone call to Jim Hogle was a decision to help him ‘understand’ and use the rhinovirus model to resolve the structure of poliovirus. A key to this effort was in identifying the ‘canyons’ on the capside surface –the deep depressions which Rossmann figured to be receptor binding sites, where a cell surface and a virus interact. Rossmann’s team also discovered capsid surface mutations where antibodies would not bind to the virus –called escape mutations:
[excerpt3]
MR …we saw that the escape mutations were on the surface. We didn’t have [as] many sequences of rhinoviruses as there were for poliovirus which had just been published. [But we still] saw that these were hypervariable regions and that they were on the surface and were not in the canyon. We didn’t know anything about conservation of residues [the amino acid regularity of sequences that stay the same in replication, from one virus to the next] in the canyon but it immediately suggested why the canyon was there – namely for receptor binding.
SS So you’re saying that the idea of receptor binding came immediately?
MR Yes, within days of the structure… [So] When I wrote the initial draft paper [on rhinovirus], I was looking up all the foot-and-mouth disease virus stuff, all the poliovirus stuff. Unfortunately its my habit that I don’t usually read until afterwards and so I was reading…and it was really a very good education for me at this point.
SS Had the receptor for rhino been identified by then?
MR No, not until 1989…
[cont.]…the polio work now had a lot of help from us because Jim (Hogle) knew what to look for. It was like turnip crinkle virus which Jim had worked on with Steve. He also learned how we had solved it…
SS In the poliovirus work, did they have all these escape mutants?…
MR Oh yes, absolutely, in fact there was a meeting in Philadelphia…in March of 1985 where Philip Minor was and he had escape mutations but he couldn’t organize them [to predict their locations] and [Barbara Sherry] showed him how to do it…
[Inserted by author] When Philip Minor read Michael Rossmann’s oral history he wrote that his ‘data of which there was a substantial pile had well organized long before he met Barbara Sherry at the 1985 Philadelphia meeting… He continued to explain, ‘Polio suffered from its peculiar antigenic properties. Most of the monoclonal antibodies against type 2 and type 3 are against a site which is not normally seen at all in type 1 [the Mahoney strain]. This is hard to believe for such similar viruses and the field fell into a morass of peptides…and immunogenic sites…[which] was seriousy misleading…[and] clearly thought by Michael to have seriously misinterpreted their data… Philip Minor wrote that he thought that ‘the strange imbalance in immunogenicity in the [polio] virus (which is not seen to the same extent in rhinovirus) has major effects on the pathogenesis and epidemiology of polio and the type specific distribution of disease, and is therefore of absolutely no interest to x-ray crystallographers.’ …..
SS So what were some of the surprises from the rhinovirus work?
MR The biggest surprise which we didn’t expect was that it was like the plant viruses, that animal viruses were like plant viruses. That was a big surprise…
[end excerpts at http://virologyhistory.wust.edu/rossmann.htm]
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Philip D. Minor is head of the UK government National Institute for Biological Standards and Control and advisory member of the WHO
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In this slideshow presentation, the author introduces plant viruses and states that Four Families out of eleven plant virus families infect plants and animals.
Slideshow https://slideplayer.com/slide/5327863/
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….continued…..
Planting Viruses Three https://jenniferlake.wordpress.com/2021/01/30/planting-viruses-three/
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