Forty years after the first cases of HIV were recognised, researchers continue to slowly learn more about the virus and how it operates within the human body.

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The latest research from the Ohio State University has shed light on how a small difference in the RNA sequence can allow the viral RNA to be packaged for replication, like all breakthroughs in HIV research, it opens up potential treatment pathways.

Ribonucleic acid (RNA) is a polymeric molecule essential in various biological roles in coding, decoding, regulation and expression of genes. RNA and deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) are nucleic acids. Along with lipids, proteins, and carbohydrates, nucleic acids constitute one of the four major macromolecules essential for all known forms of life

In HIV, it carries the genetic information that allows the virus to copy itself inside a host – the human body. HIV RNA comprises about 9,800 nucleotides.

Researchers found that HIV chooses its viral RNA, the ‘source code’ that it injects into healthy human cells to infect them – based on functions attributable to just two nucleotides.

“It’s just this two-nucleotide difference that makes such a dramatic effect,” said Karin Musier-Forsyth, senior author of the study, Ohio Eminent Scholar and a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at The Ohio State University. “If we can prevent it from packaging its own genome, we can prevent it from spreading inside the body.”

If treatments could be developed based on this discovery, they would be different to most of the current treatment approaches which primarily target viral proteins. The researchers stressed that developing treatments based on this approach would be many years away, but the discovery may be another important breakthrough on the road to eradicating the virus.

Musier-Forsyth has published over 100 peer reviewed articles and is one of the world’s leading researchers in the area of viral replication and the transfer of genetic code.

OIP Staff

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