Hong Kong is attacked by virus once
every few years. Some of the more serious cases
include the avian influenza in 1997, the SARS in
2003 and the H1N1 swine flu this year. With a
population of more than seven millions living in a
small place, these viruses pose huge social and
economical concerns to the city. To address the need
to understand and combat these highly infectious
agents, our research team has taken up the challenge
of studying the proteins that are related to
influenza virus. One of our focuses is on the avian
flu nucleoprotein, a core protein of the virus.
Nucleoprotein functions to wrap around the genetic
material of influenza virus; and the virus cannot
replicate and function properly without this
protein.
We have succeeded in producing a
large quantity of the avian influenza H5N1
nucleoprotein and obtaining the protein crystals.
With the help of high energy X-ray diffraction and
subsequent computer calculations, these protein
crystals yield meaningful data for us to take a
glance of its three-dimensional structure.
The nucleoprotein structure is in
the shape of a banana. There is a "head" and a "body". In between them, there are two protruding
"arms". A long "tail" region can also be visualized
in the structure. The "tail" is shown to take part
in the interaction among different nucleoprotein
molecules.
The structure provides valuable
information for identifying possible regions where
nucleoprotein wraps the virus genetic materials. We
then proceeded to individually remove those possible
regions from the nucleoprotein structure to find out
the most important region for such function. We have
identified one of the "arm" regions on the
nucleoprotein structure as the crucial element for
reaching out to search for the genetic material of
the virus and another 'arm' used to fix the genetic
material on the protein in place. |