We have isolated clonal cell lines from a transplanted adenocarcinoma induced by the RIII strain of mouse mammary tumor virus in a BALB/c mouse. Three major morphological cell types of these lines are developmentally linked; polygonal cells give rise to cuboidal and then to elongated cells. All cell lines expressed markers that are characteristic of mammary basal cells. In addition, the polygon...

Gypsy is an infectious endogenous retrovirus of Drosophila melanogaster. The gypsy proviruses replicate very efficiently in the genome of the progeny of females homozygous for permissive alleles of the flamenco gene. This replicative transposition is correlated with derepression of gypsy expression, specifically in the somatic cells of the ovaries of the permissive mothers. The determinism of t...

OBJECTIVES Recent studies have reported that human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) proviruses are strongly suppressed in the unique epigenetic environments caused by chromatin modifications such as acetylation and methylation. Therefore, optimized therapeutic strategies directed against the virus reservoir using these epigenetic modifying agents (EMAs) should cure HIV infection. METHODS...

Integration of the DNA copy of the HIV-1 genome into a host chromosome is required for viral replication and is thus an important target for antiviral therapy. The HIV-encoded enzyme integrase (IN) catalyzes two essential steps: 3' processing of the viral DNA ends, followed by the strand transfer reaction, which inserts the viral DNA into host DNA. Raltegravir binds to IN and blocks the integra...

Deletion of any of three regions of the human Y chromosome results in spermatogenic failure and infertility. We previously sequenced one of these regions, azoospermia factor a (AZFa) and found that it spanned approximately 800 kb. By sequence-tagged site (STS) content mapping, we roughly defined deletion breakpoints in two unrelated, azoospermic men with AZFa deletions. The positions of proxima...

Human endogenous retroviruses (HERVs) are remnants of ancient retroviral infections that became fixed in the germ line DNA millions of years ago. The fact that humoral and cellular immune responses against HERVencoded proteins have been identified in cancer patients suggests that these antigens might be used in cancer immunotherapy or diagnosis. We analyzed the digital expression patterns of th...

A critical knowledge gap in the field of HIV cure research is how best to measure the persistence of replication-competent HIV in the form of intact but latent proviruses. One approach to curing HIV is to eradicate all replication-competent HIV from an individual. It is unlikely that any method, now or in the future, will be able to declare with certainty that all intact proviruses have been el...