The London Patient
by Gertrud U. Rey Timothy Ray Brown, also known as the Berlin patient (reviewed in a previous post), was the only person ever to be cured of HIV/AIDS. Until last week.
Basic virology
A fatal attraction
Viruses have no intrinsic means of locomotion, but because of their small size their movement can be driven by Brownian motion. Propagation of viruses is dependent on essentially random encounters with potential hosts and host cells. An exception appears to be chloroviruses, which can attract their host from a distance.
Cancer-killing viruses
by Gertrud Rey Although cancer therapies have improved dramatically in recent years, the main options for treating cancer still consist of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy. This limitation is a problem for aggressive cancers like glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), brain cancers which are typically resistant to traditional therapies.
Ribosomal proteins encoded in viral genomes
When I first entered the field of virology, in the 1970s, the definition of virus included the then-correct observation that no viral genome encoded any part of the translational apparatus. This dictum was shattered by the discovery of giant viruses which were found to encode tRNAs, aminoacyl tRNA syntheses, and many proteins involved in translation. …
A portal for RNA exit
Virus particles are metastable: they must be highly stable, to protect the nucleic acid while traveling from host to host or cell to cell, and then come apart to liberate the genome into the cell. New insight into this uncoating process comes from beautiful images of feline calicivirus showing formation of a portal on the …
Inter-kingdom interactions in the mosquito gut
The gut tracts of many animals are inhabited by a microbial community composed of bacteria, archaea, fungi, and viruses. The interplay among these inhabitants can have an impact on health and disease. Mosquitoes are no exception – replication of dengue virus in the gut tract is modulated by a fungus and a bacterium.