Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1999. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1999. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Reuters NewMedia - Thursday December 16, 1999
Like a firefighter sliding down a pole, the virus uses the tube, known as a microtubule, to get into a cell's nucleus, the researchers told a meeting of the American Society of Cell Biology.
Once there, it hijacks the cell's mechanism for replicating itself and forces it to instead pump out copy after copy of the virus.
Drugs can block various stages in the virus's attack on the immune system cells it infects, but not this one.
"The findings indicate that, like herpes and adenoviruses (cold viruses), HIV hitches a ride on the cell's backbone," Tom Hope of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, who led the study, said in a statement.
"If we could obstruct this step, we'd have a good candidate for a drug to block HIV infection."
Hope's team told the cell biology meeting in Washington how they tagged the virus using a fluorescent protein from jellyfish and used a special microscope to watch it sliding into a cell's nucleus.
"Essentially, we can make a time-lapse video of the virus," Hope said.
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