Grape seed extract bollixes norovirus

ScienceDaily (Nov. 8, 2012) — Norovirus causes more than half of all food-born illnesses in the United States, and is the second greatest source of reported food borne illness outbreaks in the European Union. A recent study found that grape seed extract could reduce the infectivity of Norovirus surrogates (Norovirus surrogates are viruses that share pathological and/or biological features with human norovirus). Now, Dan Li of Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium and collaborators have shown that grape seed extract does so by denaturing the capsid protein, which is the coat of the virus, thereby disabling the virus.