Word: cd4
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Similarly, AIDS researchers knew that HIV penetrates healthy immune cells by latching onto two different "locks" on the cells' surface, the so-called chemokine and CD4 receptors, using a protein "key" called gp120. But what those locks looked like and how the HIV key opened them were a mystery...
...vulnerable--structures are either located at the bottom of crevices, where the relatively bulky antibodies of the immune system can't reach them, or obscured by great forests of sugar molecules. One particularly attractive target comes out of hiding only in that brief moment after gp120 latches onto the CD4 receptor and before it attaches to the chemokine receptor--much too briefly for the immune system to react...
Until recently, only one of these proteins was known--the immune cell receptor CD4...
Both strains initiate their entrance and corruption of the immune system via the same entrance--CD4 receptors. CD4 is a protein located on the cellular membrane of T cells (disease fighting white blood cells which identify invaders...
...experience with soluble CD4 showed Ho that there were significant gaps in science's understanding of the life cycle of HIV. He decided to revisit his earlier Boston work on the first stages of infection. By hanging out in hospital emergency rooms and talking to colleagues, he and his team at UCLA identified four young homosexual men suffering from the flu-like symptoms of a primary HIV infection. Ho used a newly available tool of genetic engineering--the PCR test used most famously in the O.J. Simpson trial--to measure the amount of virus in the blood. Once again...