Now Moved In!
I am now moved in to my new room in graduate school. Classes have yet to start, but the weather is nice, the rooms are spacious, and the campus is very beautiful. It’s a bit weird to settle into a new campus this fall instead of returning to the old undergraduate campus, but I’m very excited about what’s to come. I’m also nervous that I’ve gotten soft during the summer, so I’m currently reviewing a bit of genetics, but in the meantime, I stumbled upon this interesting article on treating HIV by raising its mutation rate.
This is an interesting idea, since one would normally think that raising mutation rates on an organism would just increase the opportunities for it to become more virulent, more resistant, etc. But HIV is a pretty high-mutation rate virus already (any specific one letter mutation will arise more than 20,000 times per day); by the estimate of Martin Nowak, it’s mutation rate is currently the highest possible rate that allows for efficient adaptation and natural selection, in that if the mutation rate were lower, the virus would not adapt as quickly to adverse conditions (e.g. drugs), and if the mutation rate were higher, the virus would mutate so much that it would find it difficult to maintain any beneficial mutations. It’s at the cusp, the so-called “error threshold” (which is roughly the reciprocal of the genome length). So, by raising the mutation rate of HIV even higher, one could tip HIV over the error threshold and make the HIV quasi-species unstable enough to hamper its spread.
I only wonder, however, what kind of cancerous havoc it might raise in the human body. The drug doesn’t look flat enough to incorporate into anything but the most error-prone of DNA polymerases (e.g. HIV reverse transcriptase), but still, clinical study might show high rates of skin cancer and congenital defects for fetuses. The lack of a double bond on the major groove side of the nucleoside should prevent too many cycloadducts from forming with UV light, but then again, I’m no expert in heterocycle photochemistry, seeing as almost all the heterocycle-forming reactions I’ve ever tried to do ended with awful black tar on the bottom of my tiny flask.
