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Brian Vastag

JAMA. 2002;288:2959.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Like a prisoner wielding metal rods to smash his way to freedom, adenoviruses can grab structural proteins inside host cells and break their way out, killing the cells in the process, say researchers at the US Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory.

"In essence, a protein in the infected cells can serve as the seed of its own destruction," said Brookhaven biologist Walter Mangel, PhD, coauthor of a report describing the finding in the November 29, 2002, Journal of Biological Chemistry.

As adenovirus particles mature in a cell's cytoplasm, they churn out proteases that remove biochemical "scaffolds" supporting the new particles. It turns out that these proteases can also hijack actin, a stiff protein that interlocks to hold cells together.

"When actin and other cytoskeleton proteins are destroyed," Mangel said, "a cell loses its shape and eventually breaks open, allowing the newly synthesized virus particles to escape . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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