Talk:Poliovirus

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Contents 1 Stand-alone Poliovirus article 2 Evolution of polivirus 3 Synthesis 4 Sequence?

[edit] Stand-alone Poliovirus article

• See Talk:Poliomyelitis#Poliovirus split for the move details. -- MarcoTolo 03:47, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Evolution of polivirus

Interesting new article on the possible evolutionary origin of poliovirus:

Jiang P, Faase JA, Toyoda H, Paul A, Wimmer E, Gorbalenya AE (2007). "Evidence for emergence of diverse polioviruses from C-cluster coxsackie A viruses and implications for global poliovirus eradication". Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 104 (22): 9457-62. doi:10.1073/pnas.0700451104. PMID 17517601. 

-- MarcoTolo 17:47, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

Hmm, that is interesting. Now that life-things have slowed down a bit, I will have time to to add some of the information to the article. (But if you want to add it, do feel free to do so). Thanks for pointing it out.--DO11.10 00:09, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Synthesis

I have removed the following from the article, for now.

Researchers from SUNY Stony Brook have synthesized an artificial polio virus, the first synthetic virus.[1] The synthesis was accomplished by following a recipe on the internet and gene sequences they obtained by mail order. The synthetic polio virus was identical to natural polio viruses and was subsequently injected into mice to prove they were active. The animals suffered paralysis and died.

This is absolutely not the fault of the contributor who added it and the passage is really pretty faithful to the BBC story. There are, however, a couple of problems with including it here, just yet. Most of these issues stem from the sensationalism and simplification of the story by the mainstream news media. The first problem is that polio cannot normally infect mice, or anything but humans and apes, it needs a specific receptor that mice don't have. The mice that were used here are engineered to express the human poliovirus receptor, that is how mice were able to be infected with poliovirus. There is currently nothing in the article about the poliovirus receptor transgenic mice (I had planned to...) so just saying that mice were infected with the synthetic poliovirus and died gives the appearance of contradicting the "only humans and apes can be infected" portion of article. In short, the whole mice angle needs to be explained.

Second, the synthetic virus was not made quite so simply. Here is actually what happened: they got the genetic code of poliovirus from a "public database", they then converted the published RNA sequence to a DNA sequence, ordered short stretches of the sequence from -yes- a mail order company and layered the fragments together (this took over a year). The scientists then hired a DNA synthesis company to assemble the rest of the virus and added 19 markers to the DNA, so that they could distinguish the synthetic poliovirus from the original. They then used enzymes to convert the DNA back into RNA, its natural state. The BBC article indeed boils all of this down to "The synthesis was accomplished by following a recipe on the internet and gene sequences they obtained by mail order." As if any yahoo with a credit card and an internet connection could make poliovirus (or <gasp> Ebola and smallpox) in his living room.

Third, that the "synthetic polio virus was identical to natural polio viruses" is just untrue. As I said they added 19 markers to the synthetic version so that they could identify it, which weren't supposed to alter the viruses behavior. But they did. Sure, the virus replicated, infected mice, and caused paralysis, **but** the synthetic version was between 1,000 and 10,000 times less lethal than the original virus. I wouldn't call that identical. The above can all be found in:^[2] if you have a Science account.

So while the paper they published (^[3]) was pretty unique and groundbreaking, the story was far more complex, and far less alarming, than was alluded to in the BBC article. I will work on including something in the article about the transgenic mice, and add the artificial synthesis bit to a more generalized section about the study of poliovirus.--DO11.10 19:49, 13 July 2007 (UTC)

• With only a little tweaking, you could take the well-worded discussion you just wrote and stick it in.... (nicely summarized, by the way). -- MarcoTolo 20:04, 13 July 2007 (UTC)

If you have any ideas feel free to tweak away :) It would probably save me loads of work. --DO11.10 20:40, 13 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Sequence?

When was it sequenced, and how long is the sequence? AxelBoldt (talk) 18:19, 28 December 2007 (UTC)