In a new study published in Science titled, “Virome-wide ubiquitin ligase discovery reveals diverse mechanisms of immune evasion,” researchers from Harvard Medical School (HMS) have uncovered how viruses hijack cells’ garbage-disposal systems to evade immune attack. The study applies ORFeome, a tool that broadens the scale by which researchers study viral proteins. The advance proposes to speed basic discoveries in virology, inform the development of new vaccines and treatments to protect against emerging pathogens. “This library reveals how viruses manipulate human cells on a scale that simply wasn’t possible before,” said Stephen Elledge, PhD, professor of genetics and medicine at Harvard Medical School and senior author of the study. “We believe it changes virology from studying one virus at a time to discovering the common strategies and surprising innovations that viruses have evolved, providing a powerful new foundation for understanding emerging viral threats.” ORFeome and other ORF libraries are named after open reading frames, DNA sequences that encode proteins. Previous viral ORF libraries from other groups focused on individual viruses or virus families that contained 100 or 200 sequences each. The new ORFeome contains about 13,000 physical DNA sequences, or constructs, that code for about 9,000 proteins from 513 different viruses, including Andes hantavirus, Ebola virus, and Zika virus. “Most viruses have never been studied in detail, yet evolution has already performed countless experiments for us. This library gives us a way to read the results of those experiments across the viral world,” said Elledge, who is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute…
