Know The Mystery How Early People Evaded Immunodeficiency Viruses

For past hundreds of thousands of years, it has been known that monkeys and apes are plagued by simian immunodeficiency virus also called as SIV, which is still devastating in primate groups of Africa.
Luckily, by the time when humans evolved from these early era primates, scientists picked up a mutation that was shocking and made humans immune from SIV, this happened at least until the early period of 20th century, when such viruses got evolved to come to our defences, which further gave rise to human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and also AIDS pandemic. HIV and AIDS are those deadly diseases and viruses which are a bane to humans and in today’s era affect an estimated number of 38 million people worldwide.
Some researchers from University of California, Berkeley, have now come up with something new and have discovered how that long-ago mutation of human interfered with SIV infection, which is a finding that could provide hints and clues for the development of unknown therapies to thwart HIV and someway similar viral infections.
James Hurley, a UC Berkeley professor of molecular and cell biology said that the main importance regarding this paper is that it explains us what was one of the last major hindrances and barriers before the crossover to human beings happened, he also further added that the current paper is yet an archaeological look at how all this has happened.
The barrier was actually a mutation that happened in human cells which blocked SIV from forcing these cells to shed hundreds and thousands more copies of the virus and as a result, humans now are unable to re-infect one another.
Hurley also mentioned that the binding site which is structurally very complex, so importantly it is impossible to adapt to it once the strong and tight binding is lost. The virus now will have to invent a completely unique and different way to do the exact thing, which took a longer time in evolution.
Hurley further added that there were probably various crossovers into humans who failed, but eventually, some hunters in Africa were exposed to the blood.
This study was supported by the National Institutes of Health (R01 AI120691, P50 GM082250, F32 GM125209) and also by the Andrew Dougherty Vision Foundation.

By: Prerana Sharma
Content: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/08/190822141901.htm