HIV has long been a dreaded infection that has plagued people all over the world. Until recently, the virus could only be put on hold with medication, but researchers have now found a way to keep a step ahead. Scientists have found 295 cellular proteins that help the HIV virus to establish the infection. Knowing this, they may now be able to develop a therapy to prevent the virus from infecting new cells, enabling patients to keep a step ahead of the dreaded virus.

The research team has been using transfection technology to discover which cellular proteins have been aiding the HIV virus to establish an infection. They have screened more than 144,000 short-interfering RNA’s (siRNA) to see what the effects are on the HIV-1 infection. All the data was incorporated with data from a large-scale protein-protein interaction database to isolate the main protein complexes that have been used by the HIV virus to develop. With this new information a map of the necessary interactions has been formulated which will help researchers with their studies.

Tags: cell, discovery, HIV, infection, protein, RNA, Science, Technology, therapy, Virus

This entry was posted on Friday, October 3rd, 2008 at 11:31 am and is filed under Biotechnology, Medicine, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.