Scientists Image an HIV Particle Being Born

FiReaNGeL alerts us to a huge development in virology and microscopy: by using a specialized microscope that only illuminates a cell's surface, scientists at Rockefeller University have watched, in real time, hundreds of thousands of molecules coming together in a living cell to form a single particle of HIV-1. A video is available on Rockefeller's front page. "By zeroing in at the cell's surface, the team became the first to document the time it takes for each HIV particle, or virion, to assemble: five to six minutes. 'At first, we had no idea whether it would take milliseconds or hours,' says Jouvenet. 'We just didn't know.' 'This is the first time anyone has seen a virus particle being born,' says Bieniasz, who is an associate professor and head of the Laboratory of Retrovirology at Rockefeller and a scientist at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center. 'Not just HIV,' he clarifies, 'any virus.'"

Re:I know next to nothing about this

[Anonymous Coward]

dunno why you got modded as a troll

I thought it was fricken funny!

But then most here are too dense to understand the difference between effect and affect, then and than, your and you're etc etc.....

Re:Ah, paranoia. How cute

[Anonymous Coward]

I worked for a VC that funded biotech and pharma startups. A big question was always market size and recurring revenues for the drug, as many have pointed out, a cure is one-and-done, a treatment keeps on producing revenue.

It's not that anyone is actively squelching a cure for AIDS, diabetes, etc. It's just that the research into a cure is not being funded the same way research into treatments are. You don't miss what you've never seen and that's the shame of the capitalist pharma program.

This isn't to say cures never get funded - new anti-biotics are constantly being researched and these are cures. Again, there is the recurring revenue aspect.

Re:They already have a cure.

[ElectricRook]

the wolf brings to the table his warrior's instincts, his brains and his training. the sheep remains a sheep no matter how well armed.

Owning sheep, I'd like to clarify...

Sheep will try to defend themselves, but they lack the ability to form an alliance with other sheep or prey animals... Sheep will try to attack once or twice. The only tool they have is ramming. And adult male sheep (Rams) do in fact kill lots of humans every year.

Most canine predators have the ability to form alliances for the common good, and they have really good predator teeth.

Sheep lack teeth for attacking, and they have an attitude of "give-up, roll over & die". You see this when you vaccinate. The vaccinated lambs take a few steps, roll over and wait for death. After about 5 minutes, they realize that death has passed them by, they get up and seek out mom for a drink. I can't see the evolutionary advantage in this strategy, we might have bred it into them.

Re:I know next to nothing about this

[Anonymous Coward]

They already exist and they are called macrophages. They don't have lasers, but they can shoot a a chlorine burst that will do the same thing. Too bad they are stupid. Without the helper T cells giving them directions, them and their weaker neutrophil cousins are fairly inept. They can fight some bacteria, but they generally ignore viruses.

Video is currently available at...

[dpbsmith]

NewswiseScience News [newswise.com].

(The link from the Rockefeller University main page is currently broken).

Re:ID

[Anonymous Coward]

Viruses aren't living organisms any more than chain letters are. They're merely DNA- or RNA-encoded "copy me" instructions which are compatible with the processes that makes living cells function. We don't quite know where they come from, though some seem to be leftover transcription errors (from cells attempting to copy their own DNA) or bacteria whose DNA turned out to be more effective when hijacking other cells than running its own. Argument from personal incredulity aside, there's no fixed limit on the rate at which viruses (or cells) may mutate. Some changes are merely less likely than others, so it takes more time for them to become inevitable. And looking back we see there have been potential cases in the late 1950s--could it have happened earlier and we just didn't figure it out until now?

Re:Resolution

[Anonymous Coward]

The kinetics don't just reveal potential weak spots, they are a fingerprint of the very crucial and delicate assembly process.

There are known antiviral drugs that can work by either inhibiting or even accelerating viral capsid assembly.

To my knowledge, the best example of this is Hepatitis B. In addition to being a very real pathogen, it serves as something of a model system since the assembly is so well documented and controllable.

If you cause the HBV capsid to assemble too rapidly, it forms aberrant sheets and tubes rather than spheres. Under other conditions, assembly can be blocked entirely. And in contrast to a previous posting which suggested that this is a "partial" cure, if you can disrupt assembly then you have as close to a cure as you'll ever find with a drug.

The reason for this is simple: there is really nothing in the human body quite like a virus capsid - from a structural standpoint they are exceedingly foreign. Viruses share some characteristics with us such as the need for protein production, DNA or RNA synthesis, which means that targeting those pathways will always have some side-effects. But we have nothing like virus capsids (ignoring ferritins), and the interactions needed to build them are highly specific and sensitive: as a drug target they are ideal.

If you're interested in the details of this kind of research, look up "heteroaryldihydropyrimidine".