The study successfully determined the crystal structure of enterovirus 71, a virus causing hand, foot and mouth disease and potential neurological illness.
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Enables structure-guided antiviral design for EV71; leaves open clinical translation for hand-foot-mouth disease pending functional validation.
Enterovirus 71 is a picornavirus that causes hand, foot and mouth disease but may induce fatal neurological illness in infants and young children. Enterovirus 71 crystallized in a body-centered orthorhombic space group with two particles in general orientations in the crystallographic asymmetric unit. Determination of the particle orientations required that the locked rotation function excluded the twofold symmetry axes from the set of icosahedral symmetry operators. This avoided the occurrence of misleading high rotation-function values produced by the alignment of icosahedral and crystallographic twofold axes. Once the orientations and positions of the particles had been established, the structure was solved by molecular replacement and phase extension.
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Plevka et al. (2012) studied this question.
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