a hand. cholesterol can help HIV (green) pass through the membrane of a healthy cell (a) and assemble proteins (B), it needs to function.
cholesterol-lowering drugs, at least in laboratory experiments, can foul the ability of HIV to copy itself and infect new cells. Although the new work is primarily intended to shed light on the specific steps that HIV uses to replicate the anti-cholesterol link opens a new way for future medications.
When HIV hijacks the genetic machinery of a cell, it causes the cell to produce many copies of viral building blocks. A type, a protein called gag, fixed within the outer membrane of the cell. Then, gag gets cut into various internal proteins that make new viruses. Building on the work earlier by the laboratory of James Hildreth at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, molecular virologists Akira Ono and Eric Freed of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland, sought to clarify how HIV is new viruses. Because HIV itself carries a layer of fat, the concentrated pair on areas rich in cholesterol in the plasma membrane called
When the researchers treated cells infected with HIV with drugs that deplete the cholesterol "rafts." - By withdrawing from the plasma membrane or by blocking its production - until they found a 80% reduction in the release of new viruses. In addition, they report in November 20 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, new viruses that have managed to get out of the cells with disrupted rafts were found to be much less infectious. The researchers conclude that the newly formed molecules gag specifically associated with rafts.
Freed said he hopes the work helps uncover the complex interaction between the virus and the cell it infects. "We can not look the virus in a vacuum," said Freed, noting that cellular factors such as cholesterol-rich rafts play an essential role in the HIV life cycle. Although Freed calls for caution to present complaints about the clinical import of his laboratory studies, he and other researchers argue that a better understanding of the cellular factors that HIV exploits can lead to surprising - and badly needed - new lines of attack against the virus.
"It is a beautiful paper," says Eric Hunter, a virologist at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, who studies how copies of HIV. Hunter added that it remains possible that HIV actually interacts with cholesterol outside of rafts, which Freed and experiences of Ono has not excluded.
Related Sites
homepage Eric Freed
homepage James Hildreth
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