Across China: Beijing

Protein could be flu key

Chinese scientists have found a protein that helps avian influenza replicate and suggest it may be the basis for creating new drugs to fight the virus and other flu strains,

The discovery by a team of researchers, led by Liu Yingfang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, and Rao Zihe, president of Nankai University in Tianjin, published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, showed how the PA protein enables flu viruses to trick cells into copying themselves instead of normal cellular proteins. Knowing more about PA and what it does may help researchers develop drugs to interfere with it and limit the duration and severity of human flu infections, the studies said.