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One of virulence factors found in the influenza A viruses is hemagglutinin (HA). Researchers at Kanazawa University have recently studied the structure of HA of avian influenza virus, H5N1, using high-speed atomic force microscopy (HS-AFM) and the findings are essential for developing therapeutic approaches against influenza A viruses in future.

"Our pilot work establishes HS-AFM as an inimitable tool to directly study viral protein dynamics, which are difficult to capture with low signal-to-noise techniques relying on ensemble averaging, such as cyro-EM and X-ray crystallography," says lead author of the study Dr Kee Siang Lim. "With high scanning speed and a minimally invasive cantilever, we predict that HS-AFM is feasible to reveal the flow of irreversible conformational changes of HA2 induced by low pH, which is mimicking the true biological events that occur when HA enters a host endosome, in future study."
This study paved the way for investigating biological events within viruses in real-time. The authors state the importance of HS-AFM for this research: "Our work establishes HS-AFM as an inimitable tool to directly study viral protein dynamics, which are difficult to capture with low signal-to-noise techniques relying on ensemble averaging, such as cyro-EM and X-ray crystallography," explains Dr Richard Wong, senior author of the study.
See: Kee Siang Lim, Mahmoud Shaaban Mohamed, Hanbo Wang, Hartono, Masaharu Hazawa, Akiko Kobayashi, Dominic Chih-Cheng Voon, Noriyuki Kodera, Toshio Ando, Richard W. Wong. Direct visualization of avian influenza H5N1 hemagglutinin precursor and its conformational change by high-speed atomic force microscopy. Biochimica et Biophysica Acta (BBA) - General Subjects, 2019; DOI: 10.1016/j.bbagen.2019.02.015
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