A gene by any other name is not quite the same, and scientists could exploit that fact to develop new vaccines for viral diseases, research suggests.
By “misspelling” the genetic code of the virus that causes polio so that the virus still reproduced but did so a thousand times slower than normal, researchers created a weakened version of the virus that trained mice’s immune systems to fight off the real one.
The technique presents a controlled, systematic way of making impaired viruses for use in vaccines, Eckard Wimmer and his colleagues at Stony Brook University in New York report in the June 27 Science.
Many vaccines contain weakened versions of viruses. Currently, scientists make these crippled viruses by letting the normal viruses reproduce in cells in the lab until they randomly develop mutations that make them less virulent. But the approach is time-consuming and imprecise.