Discovery of Lentivirus in Lemur Could Shed Light on History of AIDS and HIV

piggy submitted, created time 1 month 5 days (www.sciencedaily.com)

The genome of a squirrel-sized, saucer-eyed lemur from Madagascar may help scientists understand how HIV-like viruses coevolved with primates, according to new research from the Stanford University School of Medicine. The discovery, to be published online on Dec. 1 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could provide insight into why non-human primates don't get AIDS and lead to treatments for humans.

Scientists have long believed that lentiviruses — the family of viruses that includes HIV — started infecting primates within the past million years

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Earlier HIV treatment can save more lives

sea-maid submitted, created time 2 months 1 week (www.sciencenews.org)

Treating HIV earlier can increase a patient’s survival chances, a new study of more than 8,000 HIV patients shows. The findings suggest doctors should rethink the standard practice of HIV treatment, a team reports at a meeting of microbiologists and infectious disease researchers

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Where did viruses come from?

jane2007 submitted, created time 9 months 1 week (www.sciam.com)

There are so many kinds of viruses throughout the world, and they cause many kind of disease, but where did these viruses come from?

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Human skin cells reprogrammed into stem cells!!

Darkfrog submitted, created time 1 year 1 month (sciencenow.sciencemag.org)

This article is from Science but there's another one in Cell. There were actually two teams writing two papers, one from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (Science) led by James Thomson and another from Kyoto University (Cell) led by Shinya Yamanaka. The simple version is that both teams took skin cells from human subjects and made I-can't-believe-they're-not-stem-cells out of them. Several months ago, the Kyoto team achieved this same feat in mice. Yamanaka's team took skin cells from an adult woman's face and Thomson's team took them from an infant's foreskin

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Efficient genome-wide mutagenesis of zebrafish genes by retroviral insertions

sumsung submitted, created time 1 year 5 months (www.pnas.org)

Using a combination of techniques we developed, we infected zebrafish embryos using pseudotyped retroviruses and mapped the genomic locations of the proviral integrations in the F1 offspring of the infected fish. From F1 fish, we obtained 2,045 sequences representing 933 unique retroviral integrations.

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Host factors exploited by retroviruses

Cindy submitted, created time 1 year 9 months (www.nature.com)

Retroviruses make a long and complex journey from outside the cell to the nucleus in the early stages of infection, and then an equally long journey back out again in the late stages of infection. Ongoing efforts are identifying an enormous array of cellular proteins that are used by the viruses in the course of their travels. These host factors are potential new targets for therapeutic intervention.

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APOBEC-mediated viral restriction: not simply editing?

amanda submitted, created time 1 year 9 months (www.sciencedirect.com)

"The APOBEC family of cytidine deaminases inhibit the mobility of diverse retroviruses, retrotransposons and other viruses. Initial reports proposed that these effects were due to the DNA editing capabilities of these enzymes; however, many recent studies have provided evidence suggesting that APOBEC proteins can inhibit these elements by several mechanisms, including editing-dependent and editing-independent processes

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