FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 2011
so let's get this straight; CFS patients don't have XMRV or MLVs, but
if they did, it would explain the neuromuscular pathology....
Dusty Miller, greatly respected in the retroviral community, has just
published a paper in the Journal of Virology describing how, if it
really existed in humans, XMRV could induce apoptosis of human
neuroblastoma cells - presenting a potential mechanism for the
neuromuscular pathology seen in patients with chronic fatigue
syndrome.
I don't normally blog about XMRV or other MLVs that might be capable
of infecting humans - but we did just publish a paper showing how easy
it would be to get false-negative results when attempting to PCR
amplify the GAG region of viruses like these, which would be
especially relevant if the titer or copy number of the virus in
various tissues was low.
While several journals considered this scientifically worthy work,
they all thought the "interest" in this paper would be low.
By publishing in an open access journal, we've now had 850 accesses to
our paper in 3 weeks - suggesting at least some people are in fact
interested in it. I then wonder if anyone actually did find
polytropic/xenotropic MLVs in human disease, would they be able to
publish it?
Would it not get held back by virtue of the already published negative
data, which in most cases was poorly controlled for or maybe not the
appropriate source of tissue? Just a thought. It just seems highly
coincidental that the virus (family) that apparently is so ubiquitous
in the lab - from reported contamination in heparin blood tubes to DNA
extraction kits...can in some cases infect human cells...and can
reproduce the symptoms seen in CFS patients, whom at one point were
thought to carry the virus.
Its just a thought...you can read the paper, Xpr1 is an Atypical
G-protein Coupled Receptor that Mediates Xenotropic and Polytropic
Murine Retrovirus Neurotoxicity an epub, here:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22090134-
http://okeefe-lab.blogspot.com/
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