The function of dendritic cells (DCs) in the immune system is based on their ability to sense and present foreign antigens. Powerful tools to research DC function and to apply in cell-based immunotherapy are either silencing or overexpression of genes achieved by lentiviral transduction. To date, efficient lentiviral transduction of DCs or their monocyte derived counterparts (MDDCs) required hi...

SAMHD1 is a dGTP-activated dNTPase that has been implicated as a modulator of the innate immune response. In monocytes and their differentiated derivatives, as well as in quiescent cells, SAMHD1 strongly inhibits HIV-1 infection and, to a lesser extent, HIV-2 and simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) because of their virion-associated virulence factor Vpx, which directs SAMHD1 for proteasomal deg...

Since simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) was found to be the source of the human AIDS pandemic, a major goal has been to characterize the diversity of SIV strains in the wild and to assess their potential for crossover into humans. In the present study, SIV was isolated from a seropositive drill (Mandrillus leucophaeus) and three seropositive mandrills (Mandrillus sphinx) by using macaque peri...

HIV-1 resulted from cross-species transmission of SIVcpz, a simian immunodeficiency virus that naturally infects chimpanzees. SIVcpz, in turn, is a recombinant between two SIV lineages from Old World monkeys. Lentiviral interspecies transmissions are partly driven by the evolution and capacity of viral accessory genes, such as vpx, vpr, and vif, to antagonize host antiviral factors, such as SAM...

infectious bursal disease virus (ibdv) infects young chickens and causes serious lose to the poultry industry, worldwide. previous attempts using purified bacterially expressed ibdv vp2 failed to elicit a protective immune response to the virus. this study was designed to investigate if the initial expressed protein contained neutralizing epitopes but became nonfunctional during purification st...

Neuro-fuzzy systems have attracted growing interest of researchers in various scientific and engineering areas due to the increasing need of intelligent systems. This paper evaluates the use of two popular soft computing techniques and conventional statistical approach based on Box–Jenkins autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model to predict electricity demand in the State of Victo...

Recently, Kenzo Tokunaga's group reported a novel restriction factor against HIV, MARCH8, which is highly expressed in terminally differentiated myeloid cells such as macrophages. Virus infection in macrophages was first observed in HIV-infected patients in the mid-1980s (Gyorkey et al., 1985; Ho et al., 1986; Koenig et al., 1986). Three decades have passed since then; however, the role of HIV-...

The lentiviral accessory protein, Vpx, is known to counteract a restriction factor that is specific to myeloid cells, such as macrophages and dendritic cells. This review summarizes the findings in two seminal studies that identify SAMHD1 as the cellular protein that is responsible for myeloid cell restriction, and establish the existence of other types of restriction in these cells.