The dictionary of virology

Recently we have witnessed an explosion in virus discovery. The highest profile of these “new” viruses is the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus, which made its debut in 2001 with an alarming pandemic that infected 8000 people around the world and claimed 800 victims before it was brought under control. With new and rapid molecular techniques for virus discovery, and the recent development of mass sequencing, many new human and veterinary viruses have been discovered. These include several new polyomaviruses and picornaviruses, many of which might be pathogenic, and human bocavirus, which is implicated in childhood respiratory tract disease.

With all this activity, what better time could there be to publish a new edition of The Dictionary of Virology? And who better to mastermind such a publication than Brian Mahy? Working at the Division of Emerging Infections and Surveillance Services at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Mahy is at the heart of the action. Virologists around the world will be grateful for this labour of love.

The dictionary includes viruses that infect vertebrates, from fish to humans, and, as a dictionary should, provides concise and comprehensive coverage; even oddities like Japanese flounder nervous necrosis virus and ring-necked pheasant leucosis virus get a mention. Indeed, the book is perhaps more useful for providing information about these rarities than about well-known pathogens like HIV-1, where the single page devoted to the virus cannot begin to cover the vast amount of information accumulated over the 30 years since its discovery. However, to get around this problem useful lists of references are provided.

This book could sit happily alongside Fields' Virology on the shelf in every clinical or research virus laboratory, and, as it also explains terms (such as codon-bias), syndromes (such as Duncan's syndrome), and laboratory techniques (such as electron cryomicroscopy), it would be a useful reference book for students studying virology, microbiology, or biomedical sciences.

By their very nature, dictionaries, whenever published, are soon no longer comprehensive, and this one, in particular, covers a fast moving field. Obviously it does not provide any information on the influenza A H1N1 virus that is currently spreading globally, but it does contain a useful paragraph on “influenza virus A porcine”, which stresses that these viruses may jump to humans from time to time.

A new and fruitful area of virological research is identifying viruses in the environment. We now know, for example, that each millilitre of sea water contains up to 100 million viruses, giving us feel for the vast “virosphere” in which we live. These viruses, along with those that infect plants, invertebrates, and other microbes, are purposely excluded from the dictionary; for information on these one has to resort to the Encyclopedia of Virology, a larger and more expensive tome coedited by Mahy.