Genetic Battle

These yellow speckles are human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infecting an immune cell – the first step in a process that ultimately leads to AIDS. Thanks to the wide availability of anti-viral drugs, people now live with HIV for many years. But there’s still a lot we don’t know about the progress of the infection, or why some people have much higher levels of HIV in their body than others. Is this due to the genetic makeup of the virus, the genes of the infected individual, or a combination of both? To find out, researchers have studied more than 500 people with HIV and discovered that around a third of the difference in the amount of virus in each patient’s body is due to a combination of viral and human genes working together. What’s more, a patient’s genes influence how HIV evolves within the body, revealing the genetic battle as infection progresses.

Written by Kat Arney

Kat Arney

Writer

Dr Kat Arney is an award-winning science writer, broadcaster and public speaker, and is the founder and Creative Director of First Create The Media.

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• Image by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)
• School of Life Sciences, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland
• Image originally published on Flickr under a Creative Commons Licence (BY 2.0)
• Research published in PLOS Computational Biology, February 2017