BIOL 22100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 33: Stem-Loop, Reading Frame, Macrophage

• School: Purdue University
• Department: Biological Sciences
• Course: BIOL 22100
• Professor: Tom Walter

Document Summary

Hiv is a lousy pathogen because it doesn"t transmit well and his highly fatal. There is only a . 2-1% chance of contracting it from sex. Scientists believe it only came arose around 1920 in central africa so it isn"t evolved very much. The reason it spreads so quickly even though it"s a lousy pathogen is because of homosexual encounters because homosexual men have sex much more frequently on avg. Men are more capable of spreading the disease as well so it was able to infect a lot of men. It uses a different reading frame to make a completely different protein. Not as many are made but you don"t need much. Hiv infects macrophages which end up infecting the cells in lymph nodes. Some people have a mutation where they don"t have ccr5 which is a receptor that an hiv need to bind to a cell.