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Scientists Expose Weak DNA in HIV
Ace905 writes "The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases announced Thursday that they had discovered a very promising 'weak spot' in the HIV virus. The HIV virus, a progenitor to full blown AIDS has eluded all attempts at a vaccine since it was discovered sometime in the 1970's. The major problem with developing a vaccine initially was isolating the virus. Conventional viruses are often defeated with existing drugs, or after being tested against new compounds. HIV has been unique, and staggering in it's ability to resist all attempts at treatment by mutating its own genetic code. HIV is able to resist, with great effectiveness, any drug or combination drug-therapy that is used against it."
Transmitted through the sharing of unsterilized ATM machines, IC circuits, LCD displays and PIN numbers, the HIV virus is a deadly threat to humanity.
Attack it's weak spot for massive damage.
The story that is referenced in the BBC news article refers to the structure of an antibody binding the gp120 surface glycoprotein of HIV. This has nothing to do with 'weak' DNA. The reason why this is exciting is that the b12 region is relatively invariable, whereas most antibodies made against HIV bind variable regions of the surface glycoproteins that are prone to change from virus to virus as the genome is mutated. The majority of anti-HIV antibodies are therefore only useful against specific isolates and can be easily escaped by mutation. Antibodies against the b12 region are therefore potential vaccine candidates.
How many "this could be the cure for AIDS/Cancer/Virginity" articles get posted on /. every month?
I'll believe it when the treatment actually gets used to eradicate the disease.
Guess I'll go back to holding my breath.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
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Conventional viruses are often defeated with existing drugs, or after being tested against new compounds
Not at all. Viruses are extremely, extremely difficult to defeat. There is a reason cold & flu are still around.
How many drugs are effective against viruses? Very, very few.
The article summary needs further assistance. AIDS was identified in 1981.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Yeah, pretending that HIV "does" things intentionally to avoid vaccination is highly misleading. The problem is that viruses in general replicate quickly, and HIV in particular mutates very quickly from one generation to the next, while remaining viable. This lets an infection explore the parameter space of possible genotypes very fast. To be effective, a treatment needs to target some relatively stable feature of the virus, and eliminate the virus faster than the population can mutate away from that vulnerability. Unfortunately, HIV usually wins on both counts.
Over 30 years & only a single weak spot is discovered.
Do you destroy it, or learn to get it to work in your favor ?
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
...that when I RTFA, the only thing I could think of was the Yavin briefing on the Death Star?
"Great shot, kid, that was one-in-a-million!"
God, I'm geeky...
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
From the article:
They have published an atomic-level image in Nature showing the antibody, b12, attacking part of a protein on surface of the virus.
So, yes it has been published - and Nature is a top-tier journal.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
HIV is a retrovirus so any weak spots would be found in the RNA, not the nonexistent DNA. Interestingly, the BBC decided to sidestep this issue by not mentioning any nucleic acids at all.
You mean this vast plague upon mankind has a single point of failure? Wow! They really are close then. I suggest two possible courses of action from here: 1. Figure out how to plug a Powerbook into it, then type furiously. 2. Fly along the equator of the virus at top speed and fire into its exhaust port.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
When it comes to reporting on biological sciences, I trust my dog Fido more than I trust the BBC.
1. The BBC article linked says nothing about HIV being discovered in the 1970. RTFA.
2. HIV was discovered in the 1983/1984 timeframe. Who discovered it first is the basis of a long standing dispute between Robert Gallo and Luc Montagnier. Google it.
...we'll release the virus into the population and all the fundamentalists who won't let their children take Guardasil and the AIDS vaccine will watch their genetic line dead-end! That's what you wanted to hear from this god-less progressive thinker, right? Silly trolls.
Blar.
What do you mean 'HIV has never been seen...'? That's just not true
Ye have made your way from the worm to man, and much within you is still worm.
Only wish you were not serious, but sadly, apparently you are. Which raises the question how people actually can believe such utter and complete nonsense?
The HIV virus has not been seen by the eye or by light microscopy, as it is only 110 to 140 nanometer in diameter and below practical optical resolution. Although a group at the university of Chicago has been able to visualize something of its behavior by fluorescently tagging it. Of course then it is just a bright dot. However, HIV has been visualized numerous times by electron microscopy, both transmission EM and scanning EM. We also have structures of many of the proteins that constitute the HIV virus, from X-ray crystallography. There are still gaps in our knowledge of the structure of HIV, but in fact it is now much better documented than many other viruses. We also have tens of thousands of genome sequences, partial or whole, of the HIV virus.
We know that HIV causes AIDS. We know that drugs that block the replication cycle of HIV can prevent AIDS, at least for some years. We know how many of these drugs dock on the proteins of HIV. We know how the virus can develop resistance to these drugs, because we can find the patterns in the genome of the virus. We can predict a patient's future health by studying the genome of the virus. We know what mutations in which locations on which proteins are responsible for resistance. We know that if you give drugs with better profile against resistant viruses to people who have failed treatment, they can suppress the symptoms of AIDS. We know that amount of viruses and of CD4 positive immune cells that are destroyed by HIV, correlates with a patient's health. We know why a few lucky people can carry HIV for a long time without developing AIDS, and which mutations in the human genome are responsible for that. By now, HIV must nearly be the best characterized of all human viruses, although it is a difficult target.
So please, please, refrain from repeating a myth. This is not just some innocent scientific confusion. Ultimately, stories like this do have the potential to kill people, and if you repeat them, you are making yourself an accessory to murder.
More specifically, HIV is a retrovirus. This means that as a standalone virus it contains RNA, but when it enters a cell, it uses reverse transcriptase to transcribe its RNA sequence into the equivalent DNA strand, which the cell's normal transcription/translation mechanism picks up and turns into the proteins and RNA that make the virus work.
/. article.
It's the reverse transcription process that has a high error rate, which is why HIV's rate of mutation is so high. This results in a lot of nonviable DNA, but the virus takes years to work anyway. Eventually, some of these mutations result in a change in the proteins that are attacked by the various HIV drugs so that those drugs no longer work.
As for whether your statement about knowledge in treating various types of viruses is true or not, I don't know, but scientists do know an awful lot about HIV in particular. Each drug is meant to target a specific protein coded by the virus's genome. Being able to use drugs to target a "weak spot" (a spot that is brittle versus mutation) in the genome directly would be a major coup against the virus. This would be a great application for the grid computing mentioned in an earlier
I should have added to my post... Do no flame if you haven't seen the doc. I couldn't believe it myself...However I verified the facts and have questioned many experts on the subject. Please show me a photo of HIV, and not a computer model guessing what it looks like. Please show me the original study showing that HIV is the cause of AIDS. You won't be able to because they don't exist. Watch the show, and take the word of the experts who speak about it. Don't shoot the messenger. Also..this is only my second or third post on all of slashdot, so please don't confuse me with someone else.
> If you explore these areas, and find out that the HIV has actually never been seen, just the antibodies...
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Uh, right. You know that the we've sequenced the HIV virus, right? Not only has it been sequenced, but it's been sequenced so many times that we can see the evolution of it's genetic code over time, and can tell which people infected which people. We can tell that the "Libyan seven" are innocent. We can tell that HIV evolved from SIV (the simian version of HIV) multiple times.
Re: Libyan Seven
"By looking at the genome sequence of the virus found in children at Bambino Gesu hospital, we established that the estimated date of the most common recent ancestor for each cluster predated March 1998, sometimes by several years."
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,197
"The story revolves around Dr. David Acer, a Florida dentist who died in 1990 from complications of AIDS. Dr. Acer's death would have been far from remarkable at the time -- the AIDS epidemic was quite visible by the late 1980s, and one death earned no more attention than any other. Dr. Acer's story, however, extends beyond his private life and into his practice. You see, Dr. Acer had multiple patients that had been diagnosed as infected with HIV within a couple of years of his death." Sequence analysis of HIV in his patients shows that he infected his patients.
http://scienceblogs.com/evolgen/2006/06/phylogeny
Regarding your 2nd point, and your "err, 1983/84", please allow me to disambiguate.
The Wikipedia article refers to the discovery of AIDS, which is the modern label applied to the clusters of disease cases with similar histories and symptoms which first identified (apparently) in 1981, although it seems some doctors and researchers were aware of unusual disease clusters for a few years leading up to that point. Recognition of AIDS as a disease led to researchers looking for a cause, which led to the subsequent discovery of the HIV virus. In any case, all of this activity took place in the 1980s within a few years, not "sometime in the 1970's".
This page includes some audio clips from interviews with some of the researchers: NIH researchers discuss the history of AIDS.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
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They're not exactly tough to dig up these days if you know how to use google, so I must assume that you did not even do a rudimentary search for yourself before believing that documentary you watched.
Your comment is not witty. It merely demonstrates profound ignorance about a disease that primarily affects non-homosexuals and non-drug-abusers worldwide.