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virus can circulate faster than thought possible by surf from mobile phone to healthy cell while skipping cells that are already taint , scientists have divulge .
Unlike bacteria , virusesdon’t contain all the machinery necessary to replicate , and so like leech they borrow the goods from other cells . Viruses were opine to spread by insert a cell , replicating there , and then being expel to infect Modern cells . The pace of spread of a computer virus would therefore be confine by how quickly it could reduplicate in each cell .
However , a computer virus called vaccinia spreads four time quicker than what was imagine possible .
The computer virus jounce past cells that are already infected to more quickly reach clean cells , novel microscopic videos of the cells revealed .
" This basically changes how we think about computer virus dissemination , " say hint researcher prof Geoffrey L. Smith from the Imperial College London . " understand how viruses spread is fundamental to plan strategy to immobilize spread and thereby preventdisease . "
Just after vaccinia infect a cell , it expresses two viral protein on the cadre surface , which marks the cell as infected . When further virus particles progress to the septic cadre , these proteins do the host cell to agitate out serpent - similar projections called " actin tails , " which beat back the computer virus particles away toward other cell that they can infect . The speck thus bounce from one mobile phone open to another until they bring down on an clean cadre .
In the study , the research worker prevented the vaccinia virus from making the proteins demand to make the actin stern in the early stages of cell contagion and showed that this slowed the spreading of the computer virus dramatically . Under normal experimental condition , vaccinia broadcast across one prison cell every 1.2 hours , which was slow to one cell every five to six hours .
The find may in the end enable scientist to create new antiviral drugs that target this newfound spread mechanism . Other viruses , such as the herpes simplex virus that creates insensate sore , may employ the same chemical mechanism , the scientist figure .
The work , funded by the Medical Research Council , is detailed in the Jan. 22 issue of the journal Science .
