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HIV head

HIV is what's known as a retrovirus, meaning that information technology doesn't just get into your cells — it gets into your genome. The barbarous little DNA robots splice their ain info into yours, meaning that once you've identified an infection it's already as well late to go rid of information technology. Without advanced cistron editing technology to splice that info dorsum out, those cells now, in a very real way, vest to HIV.

That being the case, information technology's of import to know how the affliction spreads through the body. Non only could that suggest some possible molecular targets that could slow or stop that spread, but it can bear witness doctors where to expect the virus to move side by side, at different times following infection.

To exercise this more direct than ever before, researchers from Yale University injected a fluorescently labelled version of HIV into the lymph nodes of mice. The lymph nodes are thought to exist the starting point for many HIV infections, then scientists focused on watching its progression from there. A technique called two-photon excitation microscopy lets the team look inside the living mouse tissue, if only by about a millimeter.

Here, the blue labels show lymph tissue, the green viral particles.

Hither, the blue labels show lymph tissue, the greenish viral particles.

Watching the labelled viral particles move throughout the torso in this way gave the researchers a few important bits of information. First and foremost, they showed that HIV likely spreads through the body via a protein called CD169, which is establish on the surface of immune cells known equally macrophages.

A macrophage (not actually purple).

A macrophage (not actually purple).

HIV seems to first catch a ride on the bones eddies of moving biological fluids, then switches to inbound macrophages via their CD169 cell adhesion receptors. It's the macrophages that stop upwards distributing the virus from there, a perverse and ironic strategy that turns one of our best defenders into sleeper agents.

That'south of import information in biotech today, not only because HIV is a scourge to be fought as strongly as possible, but because we now use hijacked version of HIV for all sorts of therapeutic reasons. The ability of HIV and synthetic HIV derivatives to successfully infect a large number of cells is important to understand both and then we can retard it and enhance it as the state of affairs may require.

We've known HIV's general life cycle for a long time now.

We've known HIV's general life cycle for a long time now.

Right now, fifty-fifty the very best cistron therapy techniques tin but infect a pocket-size pct of target cells, and to dominate the overall population they must rely on those cells out-competing diseased cells from then on. With ameliorate and more successful ways of inserting genetic information into cells, we might exist able to utilize gene therapies on a much, much wider assortment of target conditions.

The videos produce for this experiment are a bit weird to look at, if you don't know what they are. In order to encounter a molecule under this grade of microscopy, it has to be labelled with a fluorescently visible substance. That means you lot have to know alee of time which molecules you lot're interested in watching, then characterization each one differently, so you can tell their movements apart.

In the video below, the greenish dots are viruses, and we're seeing them clumped on the outside of macrophages, while the blood-red represents a specific type of B-cell, and the blueish is the lymph node tissue itself. We can see that the reddish B-cells are moving between layers of the lymph node and interacting with the virus-covered macrophages — getting into the B-cells then allows body-broad spread the infection.