BIOB51H3 Lecture Notes - Parthenogenesis, Solomon Islands, Multimodal Distribution
9 Dec 2013
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Lecture 16: why do hiv treatments fail?11/25/2012 2:08:00 pm. Azt, looks a lot like thymidine but not thymidine. Reverse transcriptase molecule accidentally binds with azt instead of thymidine, and azt ends reverse transcriptase. Initially very effective, doesn t cure hiv just makes the concentration of virus loads in their blood and usually do not progress to aids as a result. Azt is then needed to inhibit the hiv viruses: mutation in hiv transcriptase makes it less error prone, and hence makes it less likely to mistake azt for. Thymidine: due to natural selection (blind-not heading to goal that we want it to), hiv viruses with mutant reverse transcriptase reproduce at higher rate than normal virions, eventually, most viruses present in body are resistant to. Azt: to test whether this was actually happening they sequenced genes which showed that viral strains present late in treatment (mutant type) are genetically different from the ones present at the beginning of treatment (wild.
