Semliki Forest virus viral envelope

One experimental tool in this direction is provided by some enveloped animal viruses which mature at the cell surface of infected cells (K Sri inen and Renkonen, 1977 Lenard, 1978). Such viruses include influenza virus, Semliki Forest virus (SFV), Sindbis virus, and vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV). They are extremely simple in makeup and hence are very well characterized. They can be tagged with biochemical probes in many different ways. They infect many animal cells in culture, and after infection turn the cells into factories for the production of virus progeny. The protein-synthesizing machinery of the host cell is programmed by the viral RNA to make viral proteins exclusively and these include the viral surface glycoproteins. These are synthesized with signal peptides and inserted into the ER membrane (Katz et ai, 1977 Garoff et... 

In this connection, the use of insoluble agents as photosensitizers seems promising. This approach, in particular, has been realized in respect to the suspension of crystal fullerene C60 (Kasermann and Kempf, 1997, 1998). Its marked advantage is that there are no byproducts of the destruction of fullerene and the compound can be easily removed from the solution by centrifugation. The high efficiency of C60 in viral inactivation has been demonstrated for specific enveloped viruses such as Semliki forest vims (SFV) and vesicular stomatitis vims (VSV) (Kasermann and Kempf, 1997, 1998). The inactivation was achieved in a model system where the vims was suspended in a saline buffer solution. The addition of 2% bovine serum albumin did not affect the kinetics of the photoinactivation of the vims. 

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