A breakthrough announced this week by scientists at the University of Southampton's School of Medicine will lead to greater understanding of noroviruses, the most common cause of non-bacterial gastroenteritis around the world.
Traditionally very little has been known about the biology of noroviruses because of the difficulty in culturing and manipulating these pathogens in the laboratory. Now the Southampton team, assisted by colleagues at the University of Otago and Washington University Medical School, has devised a system for manipulating the genome of the murine norovirus (MNV) which affects rodents. This breakthrough will lead to a greater understanding of how these pathogens work and, it is hoped, lead to ways of controlling them.
Human noroviruses, which are closely related to the murine norovirus, are responsible for extensive outbreaks of diarrhoea and vomiting in cruise ships, hotels, schools and hospitals. Up to a million cases of norovirus infection are estimated to occur annually in the UK.
'The human noroviruses have been exceedingly difficult to work with as there is no cell culture system to propagate these viruses, and as a result very little is known about their biology,' comments Professor Ian Clarke, who heads the Virus Group at Southampton.
'In the absence of a cell culture system, MNV is a surrogate for study of the human noroviruses. This study represents the culmination of a ten-year research quest in Southampton to obtain recovery of a live norovirus from its nucleic acid.'