GETTING THE WORD OUT

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APERTURE 22 | NewScientist | 2 April 2016
Monstrous beauty HARD to believe that something so beautiful can have such a devastating effect. This is what the infamous Zika virus looks like – probably. Zika, now sweeping the Americas, was declared a global health emergency earlier this year because of the suspected link between the virus and babies born with microencephaly. Ivan Konstantinov from Visual Science and his team used their knowledge of related viruses, such as dengue, West Nile and yellow fever, to create an image of a Zika particle. “We applied the same techniques used in research and drug development to predict what it looks like,” says Konstantinov. Zika is part of the flavivirus family so its “virions” – infectious particles – are probably around 50 nanometres, less than half the size of HIV and flu. Different proteins are coloured blue, green and grey. In the top right image we can see a lipid membrane, including a protein, and in the picture below it is the virus’s RNA genome. Although the surface of the virus closely resembles dengue, says Konstantinov, it could work very differently. “It doesn’t mean that it behaves the same way in an infected organism.” Aside from microencephaly, Zika is implicated in other kinds of fetal damage, as well as in Guillain-Barré syndrome, which can cause paralysis. The team hopes to improve their model once they know how the virus’s genome organises itself inside the cell. Sandrine Ceurstemont Photographer © Visual Science, 2016 2 April 2016 | NewScientist | 23
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