Sweet! Scientists Decode The HIV Genome
Posted by: Nikki Dowling
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news
1:10PM, Thursday August 6th 2009
For the first time ever, researchers have decoded the complete HIV virus genome. This wasn’t an easy feat, because HIV carries its genetic information on RNA instead of DNA which is more complex because it’s 3D. This is a very big deal because now scientists will have a much better understanding of how HIV works. They can zoom in on different pieces of the virus and see which parts do what. Researchers can, hopefully, use this info to figure out why the virus is able to go undetected in the human host for so long and why it’s immune to so many drugs. Scientists also plan to alter or mutate parts of the genome and see if the virus notices. If they can find a mutation that effs up how HIV functions or makes it grow slower, well, that’s pretty exciting. [AFP]
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maroon
wrote on August 6 2009 @ 12:30 pm: [report]
What the scientists did wasn’t to decode the genome, but the overall (tertiary structure) of the genome. This means that there could be various further secondary and primary translations of the genome considering how it folds itself into the coronavirus capsid. While this is good progress, this might be a shallow victory, strictly because of HIV’s RNA genome and its poor reverse trancriptase (which turns RNA into DNA to slide into a host genome) copy editor (which makes up to 10^9 mistakes in one day of replication). There are also lots of HIV vaccine trials in effect nationally and globally which take advantage of the bigger picture of how HIV works and acts in the body, but none of them are really widely advertised because their success rate so far has been, um, not so high.