Contagion is the name of a new action-thriller movie about a global outbreak of a deadly viral disease. The trailer is now available. From the website: Synopsis “Contagion” follows the rapid progress of a lethal airborne virus that kills within days. As the fast-moving epidemic grows, the worldwide medical community races to find a cure …
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 …
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 …
Poliomyelitis after a twelve year incubation period Read More »
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 …
Murine gammaretroviruses in prostate cancer cell lines Read More »
Visualization of M13 virus (orange strand to the right) using the surface proteins (purple strands) to grab the carbon nanotubes and put them in order. Image credit: Matt Klug, Biomolecular Materials Group, MIT. This article was written for extra credit by a student in my recently concluded virology course. by Ian Blubaugh A team at MIT …
The novel human retrovirus XMRV has been associated with prostate cancer and chronic fatigue syndrome. The nucleotide sequence of XMRV isolated from humans indicates that the virus is nearly identical with XMRV produced from a human prostate tumor cell line called 22Rv1. This cell line was derived by passage of human prostate tumor tissue in …
