The HIV epidemic has been overlooked during the COVID-19 pandemic but represents a critical and ongoing threat to human health with an estimated 1.5 million new infections in the last year alone.
Drug developers and research teams have been searching for cures and new treatment modalities for HIV for over 40 years but are limited by their understanding of how the virus establishes infection in the human body. How does this small, unassuming virus with only 12 proteins -- and a genome only a third of the size of SARS-CoV-2 -- hijack the body's cells to replicate and spread across systems?
A cross-disciplinary team at Northwestern sought to answer that very question.
In the team's new study, published today (April 1) in the journal Nature Communications, scientists used a new CRISPR gene-editing approach to identify human genes that were important for HIV infection in the blood, finding 86 genes that may play a role in the way HIV replicates and causes disease, including over 40 that have never been looked at in the context of HIV infection.
[...] In the study, T cells -- the major cell type targeted by HIV -- were isolated from donated human blood, and hundreds of genes were knocked out using CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing. The "knock-out" cells were then infected with HIV and analyzed. Cells that lost a gene important for viral replication showed decreased infection, while cells that lost an antiviral factor showed an increase in infection.
From there, the team validated the identified factors by selectively knocking them out in new donors, where they found a nearly even break of newly discovered pathways and well-researched ones.
Journal Reference:
Hiatt, Joseph, Hultquist, Judd F., McGregor, Michael J., et al. A functional map of HIV-host interactions in primary human T cells [open], Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-29346-w)
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 04 2022, @04:00AM (2 children)
If you "editor" guys manages to write in summaries in "real" English, as opposed to these PR/marketing gibberish, maybe some of us will ask the decent relevant questions, and maybe some of those in the know might chime in.
Oh well. SN is what it is.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 04 2022, @06:26AM (1 child)
There are several known instances of how the genes a person has and the proteins they make affecting the likelihood of their acquiring an HIV infection. So what these researchers did is took cells from donors and divided them into just under 500 groups of 400,000 cells. Those groups each had a different gene deleted from their genome. After given a few days to recover and alter phenotypes, they infected the arrays with HIV. They then counted how much HIV infected the cells and how much it replicated in the cells. They then checked what effects each gene had on the HIV replication. They then validated their result on 3 separate donor lines for each gene to cut down on false positives. After that, they did some really fancy stuff that will take me too long to explain. They also checked the expected results of all the genes they chose for possible differentiation. Only after all the analysis did they unblind the results to determine how many new genes they found and if their results on old genes matched previous research. That final analysis showed their old results mostly matched expectations and that some genes that affect HIV replication that had never been tested before.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 04 2022, @02:39PM
Seems way over my head, and maybe it's too much to expect for volunteer editors to nail down a decent summary on such posts.
Thanks for throwing in some clue.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 04 2022, @12:00PM
oh-oh, time to sell the condom plantation ...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 04 2022, @11:55PM (1 child)
Wouldn't it be easier to just not be promiscuous?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 05 2022, @04:15AM
That would help, but their is fairly good evidence that being promiscuous isn't the source of most HIV infections across the world. But even if it were or if everyone suddenly stopped being promiscuous, you'd still need solutions for everyone else.