Billions of people are infected and carry it for life. Studies have found that it hijacks normal protein to spread!

At this moment, a virus may be silently lurking in your body, and it has been with you for a very long time

All of this is caused by the herpes simplex virus (HSV), which includes type 1 (HSV-1) and type 2 (HSV-2)

▲Herpes simplex virus under an electron microscope (Image source: Wikipedia, public domain, CDC/Dr.

The main reason why this virus can spread so widely is that its transmission process is difficult to detect.

Although HSV is generally not fatal, it can still produce severe symptoms such as encephalitis and blindness in a small number of people

Professor Greg Smith of Northwestern University, who led this research, pointed out that the ultimate goal of virus infection is to replicate and release into more cells.

Viruses also like this straight track very much, but track alone is not enough, they also need something that can "drive"

But HSV-1 is more fancy playing, they disdain just playing in the epithelial cells, but also to the nerve cells

HSV-1 can encode a special protein pUL36, which can bind to dynein and take it out of epithelial cells.

▲pUL36 protein also likes to gather in microtubules (picture source: reference [1])

In the absence of kinesin, HSV-1 cannot get close to the nucleus, and the infectivity will be greatly reduced

In fact, new research has found that kinesin not only helps HSV-1 to assemble the virus, but also transfers the virus to new cells along with the virus, and helps the virus transport from the cytoplasm to the nucleus

Note: The original text has been deleted

Reference materials:

[1] How herpes checks into the nervous system for life.

[3]Herpes simplex virus.