Monday, November 2, 2015
UNL CHLOROVIRUS RESEARCH PROVIDES MANY SURPRISES
by CHELSEA TAYLOR and JAMES VAN ETTEN
A 1981 evening discussion with a colleague at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln led to an experiment, which ultimately led to the discovery of a new family of viruses that affect algae, now called chloroviruses. In 2010, an email on a Sunday afternoon invited James Van Etten to collaborate with a large research team that studies schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depression because the team had discovered some chloroviruslike RNA sequences in brain tissue from people who had died and had been afflicted with these mental illnesses.
