AIDS has become one of the world’s major health crisis within the 21st century with statistics revealing that over the past 25 years, nearly 25 million people have died from AIDS.
Could a new technique in drug discovery give hope to the suffering victims of AIDS? The groundbreaking work, conducted by Kevin Weeks and his colleagues at the University of North Carolina, has given researchers for the very first time an insight in understanding the genome of the AIDS virus and its entire gene map. Furthermore, it may also accelerate the creation of a new class of antiviral drugs to combat not only the incurable HIV, but also the viruses that cause influenza, hepatitis C, and the common cold.
The human immune-deficiency virus or HIV uses RNA instead of DNA as its map when carrying out functions. Given that RNA has just a single strand in comparison to the double strands of DNA, the folding patterns and functions are therefore very complex. "There is so much structure in the HIV RNA genome that it almost certainly plays a previously unappreciated role in the expression of the genetic code”, Weeks state. The research team developed a new imaging method called SHAPE to produce an image not only of the RNA’s nucleotides, but of the shapes and complex folds of the RNA strands. What makes SHAPE stand out from other imaging techniques such as X-ray crystallography is its ability to capture and produce high quality images of the precise position of each atom.
Professor Kevin Weeks states, "The hallmark of HIV is its rapid mutation, our study helps us to better understand how this happens, so we can learn how the virus attacks, replicates, evades and lies in wait”, “By stopping the replication of the virus, it may be possible to even attack the virus before it gets a chance to sit idling in the reservoir”.
This discovery will indeed open up many pathways for researchers to find an entirely new class of drugs that may be developed to fight against the shape-shifting RNA viruses and perhaps one day conquer this pandemic crisis.
http://www.newsdaily.com/stories/tre5745kp-us-aids-genes/
Uyen Nguyen 42040239
