In the epic battle between hosts and viruses, viruses are constantly evolving to be more infectious. Now, researchers from Japan have found that human genes also evolve to help protect our bodies from invasion by life-threatening viruses.
In a study published in December in Journal of Virology, researchers from Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) have revealed that a monkey variant of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) can counteract a human protein that defends against viral infection in a different way than it counteracts the same protein in monkeys.
Simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) is closely related to HIV, and both viruses tend to use similar strategies to escape their hosts’ defenses, which also tend to be very similar. One of these defenses is a protein called tetherin (also known as BST-2 or CD317). If a cell is invaded by the virus, tetherin prevents the virus from…
