MICE have been made resistant to HIV by sabotaging a gene that makes white blood cells vulnerable to the virus. The cells can no longer make CCR5, a surface protein that the virus must attach to before it can infect the cell.
Researchers at Sangamo BioSciences in Duarte, California, used a virus to sneak a molecule called a zinc-finger nuclease (ZFN) into human T-cells. The zinc-finger part is designed to bind exclusively to the DNA sequence that makes up the gene for CCR5. The nuclease part, an enzyme, snips open that section of DNA and then “misrepairs” the damage…
