In order to establish criteria for the serodiagnosis of foamy virus infections we investigated the extent to which sera from infected individuals of human and primate origin react with structural and non-structural virus proteins in immunoblot assays. Using lysates from infected cells as the source of virus antigen, antibodies were preferentially detected against the Gag proteins and the non-st...

Several days after unprotected sex, a 21-year-old male was referred with generalized edema and enlarged painless lymph nodes. Urinalysis showed specific gravity 1036, proteinuria 4+, nitrites negative, urine microscopy with 4–6 erythrocytes/high power field (HPF), 8–10 leucocytes/HPF and the presence of hyaline and granular casts. Urine culture was negative. Proteinuria was 4.6 g/24 h, serum cr...

Retroviral gene therapy offers immense potential to treat many genetic diseases and has already shown efficacy in clinical trials. However, retroviral vector mediated genotoxicity remains a major challenge and clinically relevant approaches to reduce integration near genes and proto-oncogenes are needed. Foamy retroviral vectors have several advantages over gammaretroviral and lentiviral vector...

BACKGROUND Drug design against human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) integrase through its mechanistic study is of great interest in the area in biological research. The main obstacle in this area is the absence of the full-length crystal structure for HIV-1 integrase to be used as a model. A complete structure, similar to HIV-1 of a prototype foamy virus integrase in complex with DNA, in...

Recent discoveries indicate that the foamy virus (FV) (Spumavirus) ancestor may have been among the first retroviruses to appear during the evolution of vertebrates, demonstrated by foamy endogenous retroviruses present within deeply divergent hosts including mammals, coelacanth, and ray-finned fish. If they indeed existed in ancient marine environments hundreds of millions of years ago, signif...

The formation of foamy macrophages by sequestering extracellular modified lipids is a key event in atherosclerosis. However, there is controversy about the effects of lipid loading on macrophage phenotype, with in vitro evidence suggesting either pro- or anti-inflammatory consequences. To investigate this in vivo we compared the transcriptomes of foamy and non-foamy macrophages that accumulate ...

Within the field of retrovirus, our knowledge of foamy viruses (FV) is still limited. Their unique replication strategy and mechanism of viral persistency needs further research to gain understanding of the virus-host interactions, especially in the light of the recent findings suggesting their ancient origin and long co-evolution with their nonhuman hosts. Unquestionably, the most studied memb...

AIMS To distinguish signet-ring cancer cells from foamy macrophages in the small gastric endoscopic biopsies using objective morphometric measurements of nuclei. MATERIAL AND METHODS Using computerized image analysis, the mean nuclear area, length, breadth, perimeter and roundness were analyzed in histological sections of ten gastric endoscopic biopsies with signet-ring cell adenocarcinoma an...

A foamy virus isolated by Achong et al. from a human nasopharyngeal carcinoma was studied to determine its antigenic relationship to the eight known simiam foamy viruses (SFV). Using reciprocal cross-immunofluorescent and cross-neutralization techniques, we found the human isolate to be closely related to SFV type 6. In a seroepidemiological survey, neutralizing antibody to the human foamy viru...

We propose a promising model of discrete spacetime based on nonassociative geometry and complex networks. Our approach treats space as simplicial 3-complex (or network), built from “atoms” entangled states forming n-dimensional simplices (n=1,2,3). At large scales, highly connected network is coarse, representation smooth spacetime. show that, for high temperatures, the describes disconnected s...