mcginnis@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu (03/14/91)
I have two questions that I would like to ask someone who understands something of the genetics of viral infection. I am a lowly electrical engineer so any explanation would need to be accordingly simple. 1) I understand that many types of viral infections are permanent, particularly retro-virus infections. I believe that the genetic material is inserted among that of normal cells and periodically becomes active but does not kill the host cell. Is it possible that some virus outbreaks come from people who were infected years before the outbreak? Maybe we not only occasionally get childhood diseases from children but ocassionally give them viruses that we had as children, like chickenpox. Does this seem possible and likely? 2) If all retroviruses depend upon the substance "reverse transcriptase" in order to infect a cell, and reverse transcriptase does not ever occur in uninfected cells, why can we not develop an immunization to specifically attack cells bearing reverse transcriptase? Is the RT restricted to the nucleus? How about this? Make retrovirus-like RNA sequences of toxins that could only be activated by reverse transcriptase. I think I read that loose RNA is readilly picked up by cells (in vitro anyway). Maybe it would be possible to get infected cells to self-destruct rather than getting the immune system to identify them. Any explanations will be very welcome. I prefer E-Mail. Thanks. Michael McGinnis Academic Computing Center University of Kansas internet: mcginnis@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu bitnet: mcginnis@ukanvax