Intology – Intelligent Technology News
Computers Technology Internet Arts Business Science Sports

For the first time scientists can actually see how HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, is born.

This breakthrough was made by scientists at Rockefeller University, by creating a special microscope that only illuminates the cell’s surface, thus allowing them to see in real time and in plain view, hundreds of thousands of molecules coming together in a living cell to form a single particle of HIV.

According to Nolwenn Jouvenet, a postdoc who spearheaded this project:

The use of this technique is almost unlimited. Now that we can actually see a virus being born, it gives us the opportunity to answer previously unanswered questions, not only in virology but in biology in general.

Image courtesy of Rockefeller University

Other team members include Paul Bieniasz and cellular biophysicist Sandy Simon, professor and head of the Laboratory of Cellular Biophysics, who has been developing the imaging technique since 1992.

This new finding may not only prove useful in developing treatments for the millions around the globe still living with the lethal virus but the technique created to image its assembly may also change the way scientists think about and approach their own research.

This technique called total internal reflection microscopy, differs from classical microscope in a way that it only illuminates the cell’s surface where HIV assembles.

When a beam of light passes through a piece of glass to a cell’s surface, the energy from the light propagates upward, illuminating the entire cell. But when that beam is brought to a steeper angle, the light’s energy reflects off the cell’s surface, illuminating only the events going on at its most outer membrane. By zeroing in at the cell’s surface, the team became the first to document the time it takes for each HIV particle, or virion, to assemble: five to six minutes.

Simon said:

The result is that you can see, in exquisite detail, only events at the cell surface. You never even illuminate anything inside of the cell so you can focus on what you are interested in seeing the moment it is happening.

This research was supported in part by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and amFAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research.