COVID: Going Down With Polio

 

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COVID-19 vaccinees are going down with polio (tranverse myelitis, Guillain-Barre, AFP paralysis, etc) and its primary form of encephalitis which makes “polio forever” relevant once again. https://www.polioforever.wordpress.com

Today I can say this is the start of polioforever’s last chapter and it all comes down to the simplicity of viral forms –call it Shape Matters Two: The essence of biological currency and the universal foundation of ‘recognition’ from our immune systems and among all creatures. Viruses as we ‘see’ them have three shapes, like primary colors — spheres, rods, and the combined sphere-rod. Everything else is dressing.

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The primitive nanotechnology of the 20^th century called Virology has come of age with Three Master Keys to the Kingdom: bacteriophage (sphere-rod), poliovirus (sphere) and Tobacco Mosaic Virus (rod). Unmasking the keys and dressing them down will tell the story of viruses in our time, from tobacco mosaic virus to coronavirus, or what some of you know from me as “TMV to CoV”. Breaking down and rearranging these biological master keys for useful purposes was called “metabiology” by Jonas Salk, who coined the term and brought the OPV polio vaccine to fruition as we entered the ‘peak fallout’ period of atmospheric nuclear testing. Polio is caused by radiation and chemical toxins.

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Bacteriophage*

 

poliovirus sphere*                                                                                                                                 icosahedron

 

 

*tobacco mosaic virus rod*

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Poliovirus by other names and other species:

Tobacco Bushy Stunt Virus* TBSV*

                                                                                    TBSV*

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Poliovirus electron micrograph

Aggregation of poliovirus*

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………………………………………………………….BMV = Brome Mosaic Virus………………….TBSV = Tobacco Bushy Stunr Virus…………….TYMV=Turnip Yellow Mosaic Virus

 

 

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Cowpea Mosaic Virus*                                                                                          icosahedron, showing pattern of regular pentamer  subunits.

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…transitional forms*

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Human Rhinovirus*

Rhinovirus infections are the chief cause of the common cold. Thrive in the lower temperature of the nose (33oC) They are transmitted by airborne respiratory droplets or contact with contaminated objects. Figure 15.02: A Rhinovirus. Human rhinovirus 16: Picornaviridae; Rhinovirus; Human rhinovirus A; strain (NA). Hadfield, A.T., Lee, W.M., Zhao, R., Oliveira, M.A., Minor, I., Rueckert, R.R. and Rossmann, M.G. (1997). The refined structure of human rhinovirus 16 at 2.15 A resolution:

 

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Norwalk virus*

Cucumber Mosaic Virus,’negative’ image of Norwalk*

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Look again at poliovirus*

 

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carbon*

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If you’re uncertain about what you’re really looking at with the virus images (re: the same thing), see the previous posts: ‘Virus: Shape Matters’ and ‘The Nanoflower Shop’ for clarity. After this, a storyline begins about poliovirus and tobacco mosaic virus investigated by a group of researchers who gathered around Rosalind Franklin and J.D. Bernal at Birkbeck College London.  In 1958, this group made two virus models for the Brussels World Exhibition; poliovirus and tobacco mosaic, the subjects of their study.

1958 World’s Fair poliovirus model*

1958 World’s Fair TMV* displayed at Int’l Science Building, Brussels*

 

 

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The Virus Structure Research Group at Birkbeck College London, under the direction of J.D. Bernal, a communist and transhumanist since the 1920s, included Rosalind Franklin, Aaron Klug, John Finch, Kenneth Holmes and several others; Nobel Laureate Francis Crick, Americans Don Caspar and, by extension, Barry Commoner, the Fraenkel-Conrats, and more. The Birkbeck researchers focused on polivirus and TMV. Crick told the group that ‘any child could make a virus’. In 1958 Crick was invited to become a lifetime staff scientist at the Salk Institute of Biological Studies, then forming in La Jolla near San Diego. His ‘group’ at Birkbeck deferred to him often. Aaron Klug took over leadership of the group after Rosalind Franklin died of ovarian cancer in ‘58 and Crick accepted his honors and appointments in the U.S.

Klug wrote to Crick on Feb.13, 1959:

“Dear Francis,

… I feel it is now appropriate to draw attention to the occurrence of icosahedral symmetry in 5 viruses (although I haven’t mentioned Bea’s result on SBMV). I am now trying to see whether it is possible to classify the ways in which a large virus like Tipula IV might be built up out of subunits, a problem you suggested some time ago. It seems to me that one must start off with…a small virus and then try to make a ‘crystal’ of it, by adding more subunits to try to achieve close packing. In this way…one can arrive at 3 families of icosahedra, namely : truncated icosahedron, small rhomb-icosadodecahedron and snub dodecahedron.”

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https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/catalog/nlm:nlmuid-101584582X213-doc

“Bea’s SBMV” refers to Beatrice A. Singer, the wife of TMV expert Heinz Fraenkel-Conrat, who worked at the University of California Berkeley ‘Rad Lab’ –the famed ‘Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’ (LBNL, and its affiliate Lawrence Livermore) founded by Ernest O. Lawrence. Singer and her husband were jointly working on Tobacco Mosaic Virus mutants and sharing their samples and knowledge.

“Southern Bean Mosaic Virus (SBMV) .  The virus of our story is Southern Bean Mosaic Virus (SBMV), a humble RNA-containing plant virus that infects bean plants in the South of the United States. Neither SMBV nor its relative TBSV were ever as famous as the animal viruses that are fashionable today as human pathogens (for instance, AIDS virus or common cold -rhino virus-). Small…plant viruses like them were easy to obtain…[and] easy to crystallize and consequently they were the objects of a concerted effort to obtain their atomic structure by X-ray diffraction methods with conventional in-house X-ray sources. Viruses had to be constructed from a few identical subunits. [We call them “virus-like particles”, or VLPs, today—JL]. The icosahedral symmetry of small spherical viruses had been proposed by Watson and Crick in the early fifties[1]… they predicted that the virus envelopes would be highly symmetrical, and most likely icosahedral, containing at least twenty copies of the coat protein in the shell, or capsid.  The detailed arrangement of the proteins in the capsid on the surface, and a preliminary classification of icosahedral viruses was presented by Caspar and Klug in their classic 1962 paper [2].”

https://crystaledges.org/the-ballad-of-the-2-8-angstroms-structure-of-sbmv/

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Southern Bean Mosaic (SBMV)*

 

 

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…”Electron micrographs showing details of the internal structure of plant virus crystals are presented to demonstrate the values of the procedure. Crystals of purified tobacco ringspot virus and squash mosaic virus and some portions of turnip yellow mosaic virus crystals have been shown to exhibit hexagonal packing…”

 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/13416310/

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At Birkbeck lab, Franklin’s graduate student assistant John Finch’s “second PhD project involved crystals of poliovirus, which were given to Rosalind in 1957 by Drs Schaffer and Schwerdt from Berkeley… 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

 

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*Rosalind Franklin (b1920—d1958) became posthumously famous for failing to be included in the Nobel Prize given to Crick, Watson and Wilkins for discovering the structure of DNA, presumably learned from her crystallography images of Tobacco Mosaic Virus (TMV):

“Although best known for being the British physical chemist whose crucial experimental data enabled James Watson and Frances Crick to solve the structure of DNA as early as 1953, she received no gracious mention from either of them during their Nobel Prize speeches. Indeed, until 1968 when Watson wrote The Double Helix, she had only received vague credit for stimulating their work rather than specific credit for contributing to their original proposal.” https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/franklin-rosalind

 

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“Tobacco mosaic virus, which causes tobacco leaves to curl and discolor in patches (hence “mosaic”) had been a model for virus studies since the 1880s; it was a simple, stable, and highly infectious organism. Understanding the structure of viruses was the first step in learning how they caused disease. By 1950 it was known that viruses consisted of protein and DNA or RNA (ribonucleic acid). Bernal and Fankuchen had found that TMV was composed of identical protein subunits. James Watson, during his hiatus from DNA modeling in 1952, worked briefly with TMV and established that the protein subunits were arranged in a spiral. Franklin’s challenge was to find out whether the RNA was in the middle of the spiral, like a candle wick, or embedded in the proteins. She was aided in this work by Aaron Klug, then a postdoctoral fellow in theoretical physics and chemistry, and two research assistants, Kenneth Holmes and John Finch. For a time, the team also included Donald Caspar, an American biophysicist. When her Turner and Newall fellowship ended in 1954, Birkbeck arranged three years of support from the Agricultural Research Council (ARC) for Franklin’s team…

“…1954 also marked Franklin’s first visit to the United States. Invited to the Gordon Conference to give a paper on coal chemistry that summer, she also scraped together funding for visits to virus researchers at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole (where her visit coincided with the 1954 hurricane), Washington University in St. Louis, the University of California in Berkeley, and California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, among others. She made new contacts and renewed older ones, building a network of colleagues whose work complemented and informed her own. She returned home with virus samples and promises of collaboration from leading American scientists such as Wendell Stanley and Barry Commoner…

“[By] the summer of 1956, she was at the top of her profession. She had assembled a fine research team, and their work produced a steady stream of publications. She had established a wide network of research contacts and collaborators, and was invited to meetings everywhere. (Wendell Stanley would later call her “an international courier of good will and scientific information.”) And though she struggled with the ARC over funding (they disapproved of her working on “second hand material” from other labs, among other things) there was a good chance that a grant from the U.S. National Institutes of Health would provide alternative funding. While in America she was honored with a request from the Royal Institution for models of helical and spherical viruses, for an exhibit in the International Science Hall of the 1958 Brussels World Fair. (The five foot tall models–modified from early versions constructed from ping pong balls and plastic bicycle handlebar grips–were well received.)

…. “Work continued on plant viruses–the team prepared over a dozen papers for publication in 1956-57–and Franklin had also started planning a project examining polio virus. She applied for and received a three year research grant from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, ensuring the survival of her research group. In March 1958, the cancer advanced again, and Franklin returned to the hospital. She died on April 16, not quite 38 years old.

“In the obituaries he wrote for the Times and Nature, J. D. Bernal praised her beautifully executed researches, carried out with apparently effortless skill, and her gift for organizing research projects. He noted, “As a scientist Miss Franklin was distinguished by extreme clarity and perfection in everything she undertook. Her photographs are among the most beautiful x-ray photographs of any substance ever taken.” Her life, he concluded, was a perfect example of single-minded devotion to research.”

https://rmp.nlm.nih.gov/spotlight/kr/feature/viruses

 

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“The nature of the three-dimensional architecture of viruses and the assembly of viral subunits and nucleic acids have been among the central issues in virology over the past fifty years. Sir Aaron Klug (Medical Research Council Laboratory, Cambridge, UK), President of the Royal Society of London, offered his own historical perspective on the resolution of TMV architecture and its implications for virus self-assembly. Klug began working with R. Franklin in 1954, just two years before the first big picture of TMV quaternary structure emerged (Franklin et al., 1956). This picture was based largely on the high-quality x-ray photographs Franklin obtained from her samples of repolymerized, nucleic acid–free TMV particles (Franklin, 1955). Franklin thus confirmed J.D. Watson’s deduction that the rod-shaped virus was helical (Watson, 1954), but she also provided evidence that the helix was hollow rather than solid and that TMV RNA was embedded in the protein helix (Caspar, 1956; Franklin, 1956). Experimental evidence from these studies on TMV provided the basis for F.C. Crick and Watson’s contention that all viruses must be built up symmetrically from identical protein subunits that surround the nucleic acid (Crick and Watson, 1956). The elegant simplicity of this observation prompted the witticism, attributed to Crick, that “Any child could make a virus.” In listening to the participants at the Edinburgh symposium, one could not help but note that TMV research has been a serious playground (pace Max Delbrück) for some of the most formidable structural biologists of the twentieth century.”

http://www.plantcell.org/content/11/3/301

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………………………………………………………………………………………………..West Nile Virus*