Model System For HIV Infection
Though it does not produce severe immunodeficiency, Visna shares many characteristics with human immunodeficiency virus, including the establishment of persistent infection with chronic active lymphoproliferation; however, Visna virus does not infect T-lymphocytes. The relationship of Visna and HIV as lentiviruses was first published in 1985 by Visna researcher Janice E. Clements and colleagues in the HIV field. It has been postulated that the effects of Maedi-Visna infection in sheep are the "equivalent" of central nervous system disease and wasting syndrome found in human AIDS patients. Despite limited sequence homology with HIV, the genomic organization of Visna is very similar, allowing Visna infection to be used as an in vivo and in vitro model system for HIV infection.
Research using Visna was important in the identification and characterization of HIV. Nucleotide sequence analysis demonstrated that the AIDS virus was a retrovirus related to Visna and provided early clues as to the mechanism of HIV infection.
Read more about this topic: Visna Virus
Famous quotes containing the words model, system and/or infection:
“The Battle of Waterloo is a work of art with tension and drama with its unceasing change from hope to fear and back again, change which suddenly dissolves into a moment of extreme catastrophe, a model tragedy because the fate of Europe was determined within this individual fate.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)
“Hence, a generative grammar must be a system of rules that can iterate to generate an indefinitely large number of structures. This system of rules can be analyzed into the three major components of a generative grammar: the syntactic, phonological, and semantic components.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power.”
—Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974)