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Human retroviruses, HIV and HTLV have been recognized as important pathogens because of their association with lethal diseases such as AIDS and ATL. Considerable resources and efforts have been directed at understanding the interaction between these retroviruses and their host which may provide clues as to how the infection can be controlled or prevented. Among the key scientific successes is the identification of intracellular “restriction factors” that have evolved as obstacles to the replication of pathogens including infectious retroviruses. The discovery of APOBEC, which are strong mutagens of retroviral genomes and intracellular retroelements, began a new era of intense research ac...
A biologically striking and clinically important feature of viruses is their rapid evolutionary dynamics in nature. The continual interactions between viruses and host organisms promote quick changes in virus populations, eventually leading to co-evolution of viruses and hosts for their survival. The structural and functional information on the interactions between viruses and hosts should provide a molecular and biological basis to understand infection, replication, cell/host-tropism, immune escape, pathogenesis, and direction of evolution of viruses. The information is also essential to develop methods to control transmission and replication of pathogenic viruses. However, the integrated i...
The history of the CCR5 gene as a lens through which to view such issues as intellectual property, Big Pharma, personalized medicine, and race and genomics. In The Genealogy of a Gene, Myles Jackson uses the story of the CCR5 gene to investigate the interrelationships among science, technology, and society. Mapping the varied “genealogy” of CCR5—intellectual property, natural selection, Big and Small Pharma, human diversity studies, personalized medicine, ancestry studies, and race and genomics—Jackson links a myriad of diverse topics. The history of CCR5 from the 1990s to the present offers a vivid illustration of how intellectual property law has changed the conduct and content of ...
One of the most important and outstanding characteristics of viruses is their cellular and host tropism. As parasitic entities, viruses have to compromise with numbers of positive and negative factors present in target cells for their survival. In the absence of an appropriate interaction with cells, they do not replicate at all. Viral tropism can be therefore determined at each replication step, from the entry to progeny production in target cells. There are two major types of viral tropism, that is, the receptor-dependent and -independent tropisms. Restriction of viral replication occurs on the cell surface (receptor-dependent viral entry step) and/or intracellularly (receptor-independent ...
Infectious diseases are associated with approximately 20% of global mortality, with viral diseases causing about one third of these deaths. Besides newly emerging and re-emerging viral infections will continue to pose a threat to human survival globally. In this case scientific advances have greatly been increased to defend against those pathogens. For example, rapid genomic sequencing, proteomics, epigenomics, nanotechnology, and other advanced tools are being applied to detect viruses at the point of care and to track their spread within human populations as well as to understand virus-host interaction and virus induced pathogenesis. From rapid identification of new viruses to prevention w...
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Volume I.A An outbreak of a respiratory disease first reported in Wuhan, China in December 2019 and the causative agent was discovered in January 2020 to be a novel betacoronovirus of the same subgenus as SARS-CoV and named severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has rapidly disseminated worldwide, with clinical manifestations ranging from mild respiratory symptoms to severe pneumonia and a fatality rate estimated around 2%. Person to person transmission is occurring both in the community and healthcare settings. The World Health Organization (WHO) has recently declared the COVID-19 epidemic a public health emergency of international ...
HIV remains the major global health threat, and neither vaccine nor cure is available. Increasing our knowledge on HIV infection will help overcome the challenge of HIV/AIDS. This book covers several aspects of HIV-host interactions in vitro and in vivo. The first section covers the interaction between cellular components and HIV proteins, Integrase, Tat, and Nef. It also discusses the clinical relevance of HIV superinfection. The next two chapters focus on the role of innate immunity including dendritic cells and defensins in HIV infection followed by the section on the impact of host factors on HIV pathogenesis. The section of co-infection includes the impact of Human herpesvirus 6 and Trichomonas vaginalis on HIV infection. The final section focuses on generation of HIV molecular clones that can be used in macaques and the potential use of cotton rats for HIV studies.