retrovirus
sa smith | February 6, 2016Listen, nobody thinks the guy who 'cured Charlie Sheen of HIV' cured Charlie Sheen of HIV.
Even Charlie Sheen.
Dr Sam
I was with u in
Mexico for
1 day.
It's illegal for u
to practice in
U.S.A. where u
treated me for 2 months
© https://t.co/lKv6YPYdhm
— Charlie Sheen (@charliesheen) February 1, 2016
... But what if he could, tho?
What would this super awesome therapy THE MAN doesnt want you to know about look like? How would it work?
That would be a fun and educational game to play!
Okay, to play this game you first have to understand what 'CAEV' is. Caprine arthritis-encephalitis virus is a…
sa smith | June 13, 2012Many roads lead to Rome-- there is no one 'right' way to solve an evolutionary hurdle. Viruses encounter the same evolutionary 'problems', but have evolved lots and lots and lots of different solutions to the exact same problems. Random chance of mutations + the bumbling blindness of natural selection ('good enough' is selected, not 'BEST!') means all that bumbling mess leads to different 'solutions'. Some might work better than others, but they all work, and thats good enough.
Its easy to comprehend an RNA virus doing something differently than a very distantly related DNA virus. But…
sa smith | December 20, 2011Sorry, Hitch. Religion doesnt poison *everything*.
Thanks to the bumbling efforts of 'respected' scientists like Judy Mikoivts, we now know that its not religion, but mouse DNA, that poisons everything.
Relatively new readers of ERV are well aware of the fact that all efforts to connect XMRV to any human pathogen have ended up being the result of contamination. Though patient samples from the WPI were contaminated with plasmid in a rather convenient (strategic?) manner, others attempting to find the virus have universally determined that their 'positive' results are actually the result of…
sa smith | March 3, 2011Scientific conferences are so cool :-D
It s bunch of really smart people getting together to pow-wow about a common interest, sharing their newest data, brainstorming new ideas, trouble-shooting, arguing, finding new collaborators-- its just so friggen cool :-D
Unfortunately, us smaller labs can only budget for one/a couple of these a year, so I am missing out on the 2011 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections :( Its also kind of a downer that Average Joes/Janes arent really allowed to come, not that most people could take a week off work to attend anyway.
Lucky for us…
sa smith | September 15, 2010Creationists cant deal with ERVs. They have no answer to the problems ERVs pose to Creationism. They have no alternative explanation for the weight ERVs lend to evilution.
However, this doesnt stop Creationists from bluffing/lying to save face in front of the True Believers.
One of the more baffling responses Ive gotten to ERVs is 'ERVs dont exist. They arent really ancient retroviral fossils.' The most common response is 'ERVs arent junk DNA! See, this one gene (out of 1,000,000 similar genes that are clearly junk) has been co-opted for use by the host! So, YAY JESUS!'
Real world, real…
sa smith | August 24, 2010Yesterdays post got me so annoyed and flabbergasted-- I needed to read a nice MLV paper to cheer me up. And nothing cheers me up like using gene therapy on kids with genetic diseases, allowing them to live pretty much normal lives:
Efficacy of gene therapy for X-linked severe combined immunodeficiency.
Most readers of ERV know this story. Some baby boys are born with a malfunctioning gene, totally screws up their immune system. The babies are fine, for a while, because they get antibodies to most things from their mothers milk. But when its time for baby to start making his own immune…
sa smith | March 19, 2010Retroviruses cause cancer.
Like how HPV causes cancer, its not really 'on purpose', its just a side-effect of their life-cycle-- insert DNA randomly into a genome enough times, and eventually youre going to plop somewhere you aint supposed to be, and cause cancer.
Thus I am terribly amused when Creationists bawww about how ERVs are perfect and special (not junk!)... cause if those ERVs werent rendered junk by mutagenesis or epigenetics, we would all be dead (technically, never born).
Found a paper in Nature Cancer Gene Therapy that kinda turns this issue upside down:
Fusogenic membrane…
edyong | July 16, 2009Compare the elegant grace of a running wolf with the comical shuffle of a waddling dachshund, and you begin to understand what millennia of domestication and artificial selection can do to an animal. As dachshunds develop, the growing tips of their limb bones harden early, stunting their growth and leading to a type of dwarfism called chondrodysplasia. The same applies to at least 19 modern breeds including corgis, Pekingese and basset hounds, all of which have very short, curved legs.
These breeds highlight the domestic dog's status as the most physically diverse of mammals. Now, a team of…
edyong | May 9, 2009
Immunity to viral infections sounds like a good thing, but it can come at a price. Millions of years ago, we evolved resistance to a virus that plagued other primates. Today, that virus is extinct, but our resistance to it may be making us more vulnerable to the present threat of HIV.
Many extinct viruses are not completely gone. Some members of a group called retroviruses insinuated themselves into our DNA and became a part of our genetic code. Indeed, a large proportion of the genomes of all primates consists of the embedded remnants of ancient viruses. Looking at these remnants is like…