Robert W Arnold Week 5

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Electronic Journal Week 5

Robert W Arnold

Week 5 Assignment

Continued Research

  • Learned about the different resources at our disposal from the Bio Dept.'s librarian.
  • Used PubMed and Web of Knowledge to find past research articles.
  • One article seemed to stand out originally. It dealt with the dropping our viral diversity in HIV patients close to AIDS (close to 200 CD4 T cell count). The article can be found here.
  • The article states that "just before HIV infection progresses to AIDS, evolution seems to slow markedly, and the genetic diversity of the viral population drops."
  • We are planning to research viral diversity in our AIDS patients and see if some of them started to slowly cease their nonsynonymous evolution due to the progression of their HIV/AIDS.
  • Immune-relaxation hypothesis is a point of interest as well.
  • Further research from ALIVE and the Markham article determined that 11 of the 15 subjects did in fact develop AIDS during the ALIVE research that Markham used. Markham, however, chose to use a brief 4 year window.
  • When looking at the original data, it turns out that all of our at risk for AIDS subjects (7, 8, 9, 14) did in fact develop AIDS. Even one of our subjects we deemed not at risk, subject 6, developed AIDS.
  • Subjects 6 and 9 are very interesting. They both only were under 200 CD 4 T cell level count once during the ALIVE research. Subject 9 only went down to 180 CD 4 T cells and bounced right back up and while Subject 6 did hit 128, it also did bounce right back above 200.
  • I am curious as to how official an AIDS diagnosis really is. Who's to say if subject 9 had blood drawn 2 weeks later, his CD4 T cell count would have been back over 200 and the AIDS diagnosis would never have occured.


Links

Biol 368 Homepage

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