CCR5

This book tells the story of Damon Courtenay as he tries to overcome the adversities caused by haemophilia and Aids. After I finished this book, I was disappointed by the treatment people with HIV and Aids received, particularly by the men and women in the medical profession. I don't want to sound hypocritical and judge these people because personally, I don't know how I will react to such situation, particularly in the 1980’s where the knowledge of this disease was very low. I also believe…

called CCR5. The CCR5 is required for certain types of HIV to enter and infect your T-Cells. T-Cells are white blood cells the body uses to fight HIV, but the most important of these are CD4 T-Cells. HIV is known to infect the CD4+ T-Cells in your blood. The new treatment being studied involves removing white blood cells from the blood that contains CD4+ T-Cells. The CD4+ T-Cells that are extracted are then genetically modified by the ZFNs to be resistant to infection by HIV by removing the CCR5…

and the CD4+ T cells were purified from the spleen to be sequenced. They extracted the DNA using the MasterPureTM DNA purification kit and then subjected the CCR5 ZFN binding site to PCR amplification for 25 cycles. After PCR amplification and gel purification the sequence was subject to a modified Surveyor nuclease assay to determine CCR5 disruption frequency. Surveyor nuclease assays are used to detect single base mismatches or small insertions or deletions. It uses a mismatch-specific…

Many people believe that it is common knowledge that HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) has no cure and will always be impossible to cure. However, contrary to these beliefs, someone has been cured of HIV-AIDS (human immunodeficiency virus-acquired immune deficiency syndrome). In 1995, Timothy Ray Brown had contracted and was tested positive for HIV-AIDS. Brown was able to lead a normal life until 2006 when he was told that he had leukemia. Gero Hutter, Timothy Brown’s oncologist, told Brown…

1. One of the sets of people that have allelic variation are Long Term Survivors who are homozygous for a 32 base-pair deletion in their genome. The deletion is for CCR5, a chemokine receptor which functions as a HIV co-receptor. Due to the deletion of CCR5, the ability of the virus to fuse with the host cells is impaired and those people can be exposed however they will not become infected. Another subgroup of Long Term Survivors are referred to as elite controllers. These individuals are…

Few things are as devastating as disease or terminal illness. Several diseases have made an appearance or re-emergence over the last couple of decades – HIV being among the most prevalent and devastating. HIV, or the human immunodeficiency virus, “is a chronic infectious disease passed from one person to another through blood-to-blood or sexual contact” (Hoeger, Hoeger, Hoeger, & Fawson, 2015). HIV was originally formed in chimpanzees in Central Africa, and spread to humans through infected…

HIV+ and had leukemia, the doctors involved with his care decided to do a transplant, using a donor whose stem cells were unusual because they had a mutation inherited from both parents that resulted in CD4 cells that lacked the CCR5 receptor. This mutation, called CCR5 delta 32 homozygosity, is present in less than 1% of Caucasians in northern and western Europe, and is associated with a reduced risk of becoming infected with HIV.”…

1. Antibiotic resistance is a big problem and one that is getting worse. Use the CDC site or other sources to answer these questions about antibiotic resistance. Please site your sources. Answer each part in 2-3 sentences. (2 points) CDC site: http://www.cdc.gov/drugresistance/about.html a. Briefly describe practices that are contributing to antibiotic resistance. First, it must be understood that antibiotic resistance happens to some degree no matter what since bacteria are constantly…

In recent years the field of virology has seen substantial growth as virus have now become a more widely researched subject. It was not too long ago relatively speaking that viruses were more or less an unknown entity, as many facts about viruses were unknown to the days researchers. Now however much more is known about what viruses are and how they work; more importantly it is known that viral agents are one of the leading causes of disease. Once it was established that they did in fact…

HIV is the human immunodeficiency virus, a serious virus that spreads through the body and attacks the immune system. The virus specifically attacks the T cells (CD4 cells) of the body. This making it so the immune system is no longer able to fight off infections and diseases as the amount of T cells decreases to an amount below the average 700 to 1500 cells/mm. (Center for Disease Control, 2015, para. 1) Once the body loses so many T cells and damages the immune system so much, the HIV…