Y. study aims at snuffing cold virus

Rather than simply urging the public to get a flu shot each year, health officials may one day be encouraging Americans to "stick it" to the common cold, based in part on preliminary research taking place at Brigham Young University.

A new study on the virus behind nearly half of all cold infections explains how and where evolution occurs in the rhinovirus genome, which narrows the field for future research into how the cold may best be treated.

Keith Crandall, a professor of biology and co-author of the new study — which appears in the April edition of the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution — said part of the reason current treatments for the common cold are ineffective is "we haven't spent a lot of time studying the virus and its history to see how it's responding to the human immune system and drugs."

If that sneezing, watery-eyed, body-aching, mega-Kleenex episode you just suffered through is different from the sore throat, deep-chested cough and chills that kept your co-worker at home, did you both have a case of the common cold?

Chances are good that you did, and that both bugs evolved over time in order to resist both your body's own defenses — and multiple cold remedies.

Crandall's research, part of a larger study to examine foot and mouth disease, looks at the "family history" or "gene genealogy" of viral strains to see how they have evolved over time. Doing so allows researchers to get insights about how those viruses interact with human immune systems and different kinds of drug therapy.

By trying to determine whether all the viruses are susceptible to specific antiviral agents, researchers can begin to trace whether the virus came from "a single genetic stock or multiple independent variations."

Crandall said the study examined data "that are now just becoming available to do this kind of analysis. DNA sequencing is becoming fairly prevalent among a wide variety of labs," which put that information on GenBank, a genetic-sequence database administered by the National Institutes of Health.

The BYU study used computer programming written by undergraduate student Matthew Bendall to mine the GenBank database for information and then categorize it in ways that allowed researchers to narrow their search for the parts of the virus genome that enable resistance to drugs and the human immune system.

"We try to whittle away (at thousands of pieces of information) and find variants that seem to be important," Crandall said. "Instead of focusing on the entire gene, we're trying to narrow it to a handful of amino acids that seem to be critical in the evolution of drug resistance or avoidance.