Scientists from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City have identified a link between a protein associated with neurological diseases and the human body's antiviral response.
The team used gene expression studies and in-depth chromatic analysis to discover how the protein senataxin plays a regulatory role to combat viral infections and prevent harmful, disease-progressing inflammation.
Their findings suggest that people with senataxin-related forms of Lou Gehrig's disease or neurological diseases may actually produce a disabled form of the protein which can't fight inflammation.
"Whether viral infection plays a role in disease progression remains to be seen, but this discovery has broad implications for biomedical research and opens up new avenues that we look forward to pursuing," said Ivan Marazzi, PhD, co-author of the paper and assistant professor in microbiology at Mount Sinai.
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