New Proteins Discovered in Herpes Virus

Approximately 20 years ago, the herpes virus genome was sequenced. This was thought to be able to predict all the proteins that the virus could produce. However, some scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry and from the University of California in San Francisco have discovered several hundred novel proteins. In order to do this, the scientists infected cells with the herpes virus and observed which proteins were produced over a 72 hour period. Upon observation, the scientists noticed that  the intermediate products of the virus had many short, novel RNA products. However, one of the most surprising results was that they found the organization of information required for protein production to be much more complex than previously believed.



Overall, I found this information to be quite interesting and hope that it may someday help scientists better identify a way to treat those infected with the herpes virus. The scientists in this study say that much more research needs to be done to take this identification of the virus' genome and determine what the actual products are that the genome is producing.