Why viruses like Herpes and Zika will need to be reclassified, and its biotech impact

In the 1950s and '60s as scientists began to obtain high resolution images of viruses, they discovered the detailed structure of the capsid—an outer protective layer composed of multiple copies of the same protein—which protects the virus' genetic material. The majority of viruses have capsids that are typically quasi-spherical and display icosahedral symmetry—like a 20-sided dice for instance.

The capsid shell is what protects them, and as scientists discovered their structure, they proposed that capsids could have different sizes and hold different amounts of genome, and therefore could infect hosts differently.

[M]any viruses have essentially been misclassified for 60 years, including common viruses such as Herpes simplex and Zika.

"We discovered six new ways in which proteins can organize to form icosahedral capsid shells," Luque said. "So, many viruses don't adopt only the two broadly understood capsid architectures. There are now at least eight ways in which their icosahedral capsids could be designed."

Their study, which will be published in Nature Communications on Friday, September 27, also shows that viruses that are part of the same structural lineage, based on the protein that they're composed of, adopt consistent icosahedral capsid layouts, providing a new approach to study virus evolution

Zika actually has nothing to do with the supposed outbreak of microcephaly. Health authorities hemisphere-wide did a massive end run around the scientific method in a mad rush to assert a cause-effect relationship. The crown jewel of the effort was when Fauxp Francis (Jorge Bergoglio) jumped on the secular population control bandwagon and announced an indefinite duration hall pass for sexuallt active members of the faithful within a thousand mile radius of a photograph of a newborn with microcephaly permitting them to contracept rather than run the (fake news, phony,invented-out-of-whole-cloth) risk of giving birth to a microcephalic baby.

Is Pope Francis’ Contraception Allowance During Zika Threat a Major Shift for Church?

Pope Francis: Contraception could be OK to slow Zika Virus

Feb. 18, 2016, 4:00 PM E / Updated Feb. 18, 2016, 4:00 PM E

By Erik Ortiz (NBC News)

Pope Francis on Thursday suggested that using artificial contraception in countries afflicted with the Zika virus would be OK for women worried with how the disease is linked to rare birth defects.

Calling it a “lesser of two evils,” Francis indicated that choosing to avoid pregnancy altogether would be the better alternative to abortion.

Abortion “is an evil in and of itself, but it is not a religious evil at its root, no? It’s a human evil,” he told reporters en route to Rome following his six-day visit to Catholic-heavy Latin America, which is grappling with a Zika outbreak.

“On the other hand, avoiding pregnancy is not an absolute evil,” he continued. “In certain cases, as in this one (Zika), such as the one I mentioned of Blessed Paul VI, it was clear.”

Francis held up Pope Paul VI as an example of a sort of precedence on the issue: In the 1960s, Paul VI approved nuns in the Belgian Congo to use artificial contraception to prevent pregnancies amid the threat of rape.

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