Last fall, using a rhinovirus C preparation grown in the Palmenberg lab — currently one of the few places in the world capable of culturing the virus — and an imaging technology new to Purdue, Rossmann's graduate student, Yue Liu, first author of the study, was able to map the full atomic structure
of a rhinovirus C particle.
Palmenberg and Rossmann have collaborated for 34 years, ever since her former mentor, UW — Madison professor emeritus Roland Rueckert, and Rossmann collaborated to become the first to determine the
structure of rhinovirus B.
Over the past decade, with the advent of better viral detection, he and other clinicians started to see
evidence of rhinovirus in the lungs in transplant patients with pneumonia.
The study also shows the power of the new method to illuminate biological pathways that mediate disease — in this case the
activity of the rhinovirus 3C protease.
Multiple
types of rhinovirus C exist and they are part of a larger group of illness - causing viruses, including cold viruses rhinovirus A and B. «We knew it would be different from rhinovirus A and B: It didn't respond to drugs, it used a different receptor, it had different biological properties.
For instance, Liu uncovered physical
features of rhinovirus C that help explain why it is resistant to standard antiviral treatments, how it interacts with cells to cause infection, and why it behaves as a different disease from other members of the enterovirus family.
There is no single virus that causes the common cold, although the most common cold - producing viruses among humans belong to the
family of rhinoviruses.
For those reasons alone — aside from the abject anguish of a gushing nose, the feeling of glass in the throat, and all the other
joys of a rhinovirus — avoiding a cold should be at the top of the to - do list.
A paper published last April in Science detailed how geneticists sequenced the RNA from 100
strains of rhinovirus — all the known types of the leading cause of the cold.