An exploration of the serious/fun/ridiculous - past/present/future of the brain and the science that loves it....but this site is dead so visit the new omnibrain: http://scienceblogs.com/omnibrain

Monday, May 29, 2006

An HIV virus addicted to the drug trying to stop it.

You get all the details from the picture yet?
Ok cool...

So I just thought this was pretty ironic that:
We describe an evolutionary pathway taken by HIV-1 to escape from the selective pressure of T20 in a treated patient. Besides the appearance of T20-resistant variants, we report for the first time the emergence of drug-dependent viruses with mutations in both the HR1 and HR2 domains of the envelope glycoprotein 41. We propose a mechanistic model for the dependence of HIV-1 entry on the T20 peptide. The T20-dependent mutant is more prone to undergo the conformational switch that results in formation of the fusogenic six-helix bundle structure in gp41. A premature switch will generate non-functional envelope glycoproteins ("dead spikes") on the surface of the virion, and T20 prevents this abortive event by acting as a "safety pin" that preserves an earlier pre-fusion conformation.
Or in other words the AIDS virus mutates in an attempt to bypass a drugs effects, and then becomes dependent on the drug trying to stop its advance. Ohh.. also, I could be reading this completely wrong since I know absolutely nothing about virology or whatever.


posted by Steve at 5/29/2006 08:38:00 AM  

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Links to this post:

Create a Link

<< Home