BIOL359 Chapter Notes -Reverse Transcriptase, Integrase, Thymidine
14 Aug 2014
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Prevents the addition of more nucleotides in the growing dna strand b/c. Azt has an n3 group instead of oh so no more nucleotides can be added: overtime, azt loses effectiveness for 2 reasons, long term exposure to azt causes a cell to make less thymidine kinase . Evolution by natural selection: replication errors produce mutations in the reverse transcriptase gene. Virions carrying different rt genes produce versions of the rt enzyme that vary in their resistance to. Azt: the mutant virions pass their rt genes, and thus their azt resistance or susceptibility, to their offspring. Natural selection heritable traits that lead to survival and abundant reproduction spread in populations and heritable traits that lead to reproductive failure disappear. Integrase inhibitors block hiv"s dna from inserting into the host genome: protease inhibitors prevent protease from cleaving viral precursor proteins. Hiv populations evolve resistance so easily because: high mutation rate, short generation time.
