Hosts: Vincent Racaniello, Dickson Despommier, Alan Dove, and Rich Condit
Vincent, Dickson, Alan, and Rich answer listener questions about maternal infection and fetal injury, viral gene therapy, eyeglasses and influenza, filtering prions from blood, eradication of rinderpest, Tamiflu resistance of H1N1 influenza, bacteriophages and the human microbiome, H1N1 vaccine recalls, human tumor viruses, RNA interference, and junk DNA.
This episode is sponsored by Data Robotics Inc. Use the promotion code VINCENT to receive $50 off a Drobo or $100 off a Drobo S.
Win a free Drobo S! Contest rules here.
[powerpress url=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/twiv/TWiV071.mp3″]
Click the arrow above to play, or right-click to download TWiV #71 (63 MB .mp3, 88 minutes)
Subscribe to TWiV (free) in iTunes , at the Zune Marketplace, by the RSS feed, or by email.
Links for this episode:
- Maternal infection and fetal neurological injury
- Filtering prions from blood (prion capture technology)
- Eradication of rinderpest (Merck veterinary manual)
- Podcasts from Life in the Universe course
- Immune Attack video game
- H1N1 review article and Holmes on genetic hijacking
- Podcast on Merck vaccines
- Ft. Lee NJ snowed in (jpg)
Weekly Science Picks
Dickson and Alan NSF/AAAS Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge
Rich Foundation by Issac Asimov
Vincent Natural Obsessions by Natalie Angier
Send your virology questions and comments (email or mp3 file) to twiv@microbe.tv or leave voicemail at Skype: twivpodcast. You can also post articles that you would like us to discuss at microbeworld.org and tag them with twiv.
The article on rinderpest really should mention Dr. Yilma, who developed the vaccinia based vaccine that is stable enough in the field to have high efficacy. He left Ethiopia to develop that vaccine and did it.
On the question from a biology student about antiviral gene therapy. T-cell receptor gene transfer has been proposed as a therapy for HIV infection. There was a paper in Nature Medicine in 2008 on this subject ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18997777). The idea is that by enhancing the TCR binding, it would be a way to help T-cells recognize viral escape variants. Apparently a clinical trial has been approved to test this approach (at U Penn, I believe).
Otherwise, for rinderpest, I thought the vaccine used in the eradication campaign was an attenuated rinderpest virus, not a vaccinia recombinant. As that right?
DMc
You are correct, the rinderpest vaccine is an attenuated strain, not a
vaccinia recombinant. We'll fix this on an upcoming TWiV.
You are correct, the rinderpest vaccine is an attenuated strain, not a
vaccinia recombinant. We'll fix this on an upcoming TWiV.