Basic virology

Women AND men beware: HPV, the culprit behind more than just cervical cancers?

1 Comment / Basic virology, Information / By Vincent Racaniello

This article was written for extra credit by a student in my virology course. by Bethany DiPrete Human papillomavirus (HPV) infection is the most common sexually transmitted disease in the United States, and as of yet, there is no cure. However, there is a vaccine to prevent infection by certain strains. Recent research may encourage not …

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Virology at the Deutsches Museum

4 Comments / Basic virology, Information / By Vincent Racaniello

I just returned from a 17-day, 3,000 km road trip with my family in Europe. When I travel I’m always on the lookout for virus-related information and I found some at the Deutsches Museum in Munich, Germany. This museum showcases science and technology – it has over 100,000 objects illustrating the historical progression of areas such …

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Thirty years of infectious enthusiasm

18 Comments / Basic virology, Events / By Vincent Racaniello

Thirty years ago this month I did an experiment that set the course of my career, and provided an important step forward for animal virology. I showed that a cloned DNA copy of the poliovirus RNA genome is infectious in mammalian cells. When I arrived as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of David Baltimore …

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Transgenic mice susceptible to poliovirus

12 Comments / Basic virology, Information / By Vincent Racaniello

Yesterday I terminated the last remaining mice in my small colony, including the line of poliovirus receptor transgenic mice that we established here in 1990. Remarkably, I had never written about this animal model for poliomyelitis which has played an important role in the work done in my laboratory. While I was still working on …

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Poliomyelitis after a twelve year incubation period

11 Comments / Basic virology, Information / By Vincent Racaniello

Analysis of poliovirus recovered from the stool of a patient with fatal poliomyelitis revealed that she had been infected with the virus 12 years earlier, probably when one of her children received the oral poliovirus vaccine. This case has the longest known incubation period for vaccine-derived poliomyelitis, and highlights our still rudimentary understanding of how …

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Murine gammaretroviruses in prostate cancer cell lines

16 Comments / Basic virology, Information / By Vincent Racaniello

The retrovirus XMRV arose during passage of a human prostate tumor in nude mice. The genomes of these mice contain two different proviral DNAs related to XMRV, pre-XMRV-1 and pre-XMRV-2, that recombined to produce XMRV that has been isolated from humans. Two other prostate cancer cell lines also contain mouse gammaretroviruses that are not XMRV. These viruses …

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