OBJECTIVE This article aims to determine the incidence of periapical granuloma from extracted teeth and correlate the clinical diagnoses with the histopathological types of periapical granuloma. PATIENTS AND METHODS Over a period of eight months, a prospective study designed as a routine biopsy of recoverable periapical tissues obtained from patients who had single tooth extraction was carrie...

See page 932 Emerging zoonotic diseases are among the most important public-health threats facing humanity. One of the major examples is the AIDS epidemic which emerged in the 1980s as a result of cross-species transmissions of simian immunodeficiency viruses (SIVs) to human beings several decades earlier. As with HIV, other retroviruses (such as human T-lymphotropic viruses 1 and 2) are also o...

The genome of simian foamy virus type 1 encodes a transcriptional transactivator (Taf) that dramatically elevates gene expression directed by the viral long terminal repeat. In this report, we describe the functional domains of simian foamy virus type 1 Taf. Several taf mutants and fusion proteins of Taf and the DNA-binding domain of the Saccharomyces cerevisiae transcriptional transactivator G...

The induction of 2F5- and 4E10-like antibodies broadly neutralising HIV-1 and targeting the membrane external proximal region (MPER) of the transmembrane envelope protein gp41 would be a major advancement for the development of a preventive HIV-1 vaccine, but successful attempts remain rare. Recent studies demonstrated that broadly reactive antibodies develop relatively late during infection an...

The molecular biology of spuma or foamy retroviruses is different from that of the other members of the Retroviridae. Among the distinguishing features, the N-terminal domain of the foamy virus Env glycoprotein, the 16-kDa Env leader protein Elp, is a component of released, infectious virions and is required for particle budding. The transmembrane protein Elp specifically interacts with N-termi...

The p12 protein of murine leukemia virus (MuLV) group-specific antigen (Gag) is associated with the preintegration complex, and mutants of p12 (PM14) show defects in nuclear entry or retention. Here we show that p12 proteins engineered to encode peptide sequences derived from known viral tethering proteins can direct chromatin binding during the early phase of viral replication and rescue a let...

Foamy viruses (FVs), or spumaviruses, are integrating retroviruses that have been developed as vectors. Here we generated nonintegrating foamy virus (NIFV) vectors by introducing point mutations into the highly conserved DD35E catalytic core motif of the foamy virus integrase sequence. NIFV vectors produced high-titer stocks, transduced dividing cells, and did not integrate. Cells infected with...