After the eradication of smallpox in 1980, the World Health Organization called for destruction of known remaining stocks of the virus. The United States and Russia, which hold the known stocks of smallpox virus, have not destroyed their stocks. The WHO met in January 2011 to debate the future of smallpox, and a committee will …
I joined Marc Pelletier and Ruedi Aebersold on episode 76 of Futures in Biotech for a conversation about how mass spectrometry has become one of the most important technologies in our move towards personalized medicine. We also talk about systems biology, a topic we first discussed in TWiV #121. [powerpress url=”http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/twit.cachefly.net/fib0076.mp3″] Click the arrow above …
We have just completed lecture #13 in my Columbia University virology course, which means that we are now at the halfway mark. In the first eleven lectures we covered basic aspects of viral replication in cell culture, including virus entry into cells, genome replication, and assembly. The remainder of the course is concerned with viral …
Integration of retroviral DNA into the cellular genome is essential for the production of new infectious particles. A strong argument that the novel human retrovirus XMRV is not a laboratory contaminant is the finding that viral DNA is integrated in chromosomal DNA of prostate tumors. Nucleotide sequence analyses of 14 integration sites in prostate tumor DNAs …
From the New York Times: Dr. Edwin D. Kilbourne, a medical researcher who figured out how to outwit fast-evolving flu germs, developing a new vaccine each year by intermingling genes of different disease strains, died Monday in Branford, Conn. He was 90. I’m saddened by Dr. Kilbourne’s passing – he was the Chairman of the Department …
The first detailed study of infection of nonhuman primates with the retrovirus XMRV reveals that the virus establishes a persistent infection characterized by infection of multiple tissues. Viremia (virus in the blood) is low and transient, with proviral DNA detectable in blood lymphocytes. The results show that the Rhesus macaque can be used to study …
