UW-Madison researchers made a startling discovery recently, finding evidence showing links between viruses that harbor agents that cause AIDS, the common cold and hepatitis.
The finding unites large groups of viruses thought to be distinct. It may speed the search for vaccines and treatments for a wide range of ailments that plague humans and animals.
“Recognition of these links means that principles learned from a variety of virus systems now can be used to illuminate many others, allowing integration and generalization of knowledge across a wide range of important pathogens,” Paul Ahlquist of the UW Howard Hughes Medical Institute said.
Ahlquist, who authored the study, said the results show that viruses which cause ailments such as the common cold, hepatitis C, foot-and-mouth disease and many others are functionally and probably evolutionarily related to HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
The finding is a surprise because many of the viruses responsible for these illnesses reproduce in ways so different from each other biologically that they were long believed to be unrelated.
All viruses belong to any of six major classifications. Each class differs in important and fundamental ways and each appears to represent major evolutionary lineages, Ahlquist said. The researchers found that key features of replication run parallel in three of the six broad classes of viruses.
Remarkably, Alquist said, while the viruses in these three groups build different structures to move between host cells, basic mechanisms in their replication appear to be the same.
The linked virus groups are: positive strand RNA viruses, which include hepatitis C and the common cold; reverse transcribing viruses, which include HIV; and double stranded RNA viruses, which includes rotavirus, a type of virus that kills about one million children each year in developing countries. The three groups include over half of the world’s known virus families.
Alquist and co-authors Michael Schwartz, Jianbo Chen, Michael Janda, Michael Sullivan and Johan den Boon reported their discovery in the journal Molecular Cell.
The team will continue to research how viruses function.
“We do not want to suggest that these discoveries will yield new treatments for viruses tomorrow,” Ahlquist told the Wisconsin State Journal. “However, over the long term, understanding that these viruses share common properties should enable new antiviral strategies and allow strategies developed for one type of virus to be generalized to others.”
