The Empty Virus

Research by the Scripps Research Institute indicates that an empty protein capsule of the cowpea mosaic virus might be effective in human genetic therapies.  The capsule contains none of the virus's genetic information, so would not be able to infect humans even if it was a human virus instead of a plant virus.  The researchers wanted to know if the empty capsule would maintain its structure without the DNA, so they used X-ray crystallography to examine images of the structures of the cowpea mosaic virus and the empty capsule.  The results confirmed that the structures are similar enough for the capsule to be modified in the same manner as the virus, which has been manipulated by scientists for some time.

I thought this interesting because we were talking about using viruses to insert good copies of a defective gene in a person.  It certainly is a very interesting concept, but it sounds like a very expensive concept, because since the foreign DNA would probably be degraded by the cell it would have to be reapplied often.  Unless reverse transcriptase could be used to actually insert the gene into the cell's DNA, although that might disrupt other genes.  Give it a few years or decades and the price would probably come down.