conclusions igm alone is not a marker for viral shedding in genital tract. molecular testing in conjunction of igg test should be evaluated as an option to determine hsv status, and applied for research on hsv genital infections records. methods two hundred and eight females were included in the study; igm antibodies against hsv1/2 were detected in serum samples; the real-time polymerase chain ...

The origin of viruses remains mysterious because of their diverse and patchy molecular and functional makeup. Although numerous hypotheses have attempted to explain viral origins, none is backed by substantive data. We take full advantage of the wealth of available protein structural and functional data to explore the evolution of the proteomic makeup of thousands of cells and viruses. Despite ...

The diverse consequences of different viral infections on the human population reflect both the history of their origins and the nature of their ongoing evolution. Advances in the ease of finding and characterizing viral genome sequences are having a major impact on our understanding of the diversity of human viruses and of their relatives infecting other species.

Mitochondrial research has influenced concepts in anthropology, human physiology and pathophysiology. We present here direct evidence that human recombinant viruses can localize in mitochondria to disrupt their integrity. This finding, while opening new perspectives in viral gene therapy, may provide new insights into the pathogenesis, prevention and treatment of viral diseases. In addition, it...

Cytotoxic T lymphocyte (CTL) responses exert a suppressive effect on HIV and simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) replication. Under the CTL pressure, viral CTL escape mutations are frequently selected with viral fitness costs. Viruses with such CTL escape mutations often need additional viral genome mutations for recovery of viral fitness. Persistent HIV/SIV infection sometimes shows replacemen...

Although viral infection and antiviral defence are ubiquitous, genetic data are currently unavailable from the vast majority of animal phyla-potentially biasing our overall perspective of the coevolutionary process. Rapid adaptive evolution is seen in some insect antiviral genes, consistent with invertebrate-virus 'arms-race' coevolution, but equivalent signatures of selection are hard to detec...

Time-scales of viral evolution and emergence have been studied widely, but are often poorly understood. Molecular analyses of viral evolutionary time-scales generally rely on estimates of rates of nucleotide substitution, which vary by several orders of magnitude depending on the timeframe of measurement. We analysed data from all major groups of viruses and found a strong negative relationship...

Rapid evolution and high intrahost sequence diversity are hallmarks of human and simian immunodeficiency virus (HIV/SIV) infection. Minor viral variants have important implications for drug resistance, receptor tropism, and immune evasion. Here, we used ultradeep pyrosequencing to sequence complete HIV/SIV genomes, detecting variants present at a frequency as low as 1%. This approach provides a...

Whether HIV-1 evolution in infected individuals is dominated by deterministic or stochastic effects remains unclear because current estimates of the effective population size of HIV-1 in vivo, N(e), are widely varying. Models assuming HIV-1 evolution to be neutral estimate N(e)~10²-10⁴, smaller than the inverse mutation rate of HIV-1 (~10⁵), implying the predominance of stochastic forces. In co...