The mosquito-borne Zika virus that causes many neurological problems in newborn babies directly infects the brain progenitor cells that are destined to become neurons a new study has found. The findings showed that the neural progenitors can be infected by a strain of Zika virus. The virus was found to infect about 20 per cent of cells on average evade immune system detection as well as continue to replicate for weeks. We found that the virus kills some neural progenitor cells but not all. Other cells survive the infection and surprisingly continue to replicate the virus for many weeks. In
