In the fight against viral infection, spelling counts
November 13, 2017
For millions of years, humans and viruses have engaged in a constant tug of war: as our cells evolve new ways to defend us from our viral enemies, these pathogens in turn acquire new traits to sidestep those defenses.
Now, scientists have found that a key similarity between our genes and those of many viruses—a way of spelling out the genetic code - has likely allowed viruses to evade our cellular defenses. Paul Bieniasz, a Rockefeller professor and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator who led the work, says it began as an effort to understand how the viral genome affects the infectious potency of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
Read more at:
https://phys.org/news/2017-11-viral-infection.html#jCp
