Boston- A new finding presented at a conference here last week threw cold water on passionate debate about the link between a new retrovirus and mouse prostate cancer and chronic fatigue syndrome in humans. Yet few believe he will end the controversy, which began in 06.
In extensive sleuthing expedition that looked back nearly 20 years, two collaborators research teams maintain that they have evidence that the virus xenotropic murine leukemia-related virus (XMRV) results from the chance to construct pieces of two mouse viruses in laboratory experiments and the connections to human disease are false. "It nails," said retrovirologist Nathaniel Landau of the University of New York. "Everyone working on this thing this virus infect their stuff. It was a huge waste of time and money."
Vinay Pathak, a retrovirologist working program drug resistance HIV managed by the National Cancer Institute of the USA (NCI) in Frederick, Maryland, presented the new data at the 18th Conference on retroviruses and opportunistic infections. Pathak explained how he was intrigued by a 09 study that showed how a line of human prostate cancer cells were infected with XMRV. He gained more quick to use the cell line in particular material, tumors grown in mice, called xenografts, which were then "transplanted" to other mice and found that the original human tumor could not harboring XMRV.
Even more surprising, the laboratory Pathak noted that some of the first samples of xenografts had a strand of DNA that was almost identical to about half of the genome of XMRV. A group led by John Coffin, who works both NCI and Tufts University here, made a similar discovery with different samples of xenografts. When teams have compared notes, they saw that the two perfectly superimposed to form XMRV sequences. "It was an incredible moment, the kind that once or twice occurs in a career," said Coffin. "It was like watching a puzzle come together." As Pathak stressed in his speech, the DNA sequences in what they called preXMRV preXMRV-1 and-2 are almost identical to XMRV sequences have found in humans, but suspected to be a laboratory contaminant some groups. Retrovirus frequently recombine with each other, which is how the two sequences preXMRV probably become XMRV. Now Coffin is convinced that "there is contamination."
A longer version of this article will appear in this week's issue of Science.
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