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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

An infection with cytomegalovirus is usually harmless for adults. However, during pregnancy the virus can be transmitted to the unborn baby and cause malformations. Once the viruses have invaded a human cell, they start to produce large amounts of viral proteins. This includes more than 500 different proteins and peptides, including 200 previously unknown to science.

This discovery was made possible by a new bioinformatics analysis method developed at the Department of Virology of Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU) in Bavaria, Germany. The teams of Professor Lars Dölken and Professor Florian Erhard have published their method in the journal Nature Methods. The new technique is relevant for medical applications, because knowledge of the repertoire of viral proteins used to evade the immune system, for example, is crucial to fight infections or develop vaccines.

What makes the JMU development superior to the previous method? It allows the ribosomal activities to be captured much more accurately than before. All proteins and peptides are assembled at the numerous ribosomes of a cell. During viral infection, the ribosomes also synthesize all proteins the virus needs to reproduce. The assembly instructions are delivered by special messenger molecules, the mRNAs.

[...] To make this possible, the Würzburg scientists provide their analysis tool as open-source software on the internet. They assume that their method will be used on a wide scale and become the international standard to analyse Ribo-seq experiments.

Florian Erhard, Anne Halenius, Cosima Zimmermann, Anne L'Hernault, Daniel J Kowalewski, Michael P Weekes, Stefan Stevanovic, Ralf Zimmer, Lars Dölken. Improved Ribo-seq enables identification of cryptic translation events. Nature Methods, 2018; DOI: 10.1038/nmeth.4631

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