( o work together the prospects are very...)CHAVI announces international search for genes affecting HIV response

"This is exactly the kind of work we are trying to catalyze," said CHAVI director Barton Haynes, M.D. Haynes is a professor of medicine and director of the Human Vaccine Institute at Duke University Medical Center.

Despite repeated exposures, some people apparently never become infected with HIV. Among those who become infected, there is dramatic variation in how the body responds to HIV and in how long it takes for infection to progress to AIDS. EuroCHAVI scientists will try to understand these differences by searching for an underlying genetic influence.

Typically, scientists use genetic analysis to search for minor changes in the sequence of 3 billion DNA letters that make up the human genome. The changes, called single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), are like single-letter variations in the spellings of a word. The SNPs cluster in local neighborhoods, known as haplotypes, within the genome. Most of these variations are biologically meaningless, but a small fraction can alter the function of a gene. Combining the effect of many slightly altered genes may significantly increase the risk of disease -- in this case, HIV/AIDS.

The genome studies will be carried out at the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy and the University of Lausanne. "Large-scale genome analyses like this are critical for determining the role of the genome in complex diseases such as AIDS," said Huntington Willard, Ph.D., director of the Duke genomics institute. The combination of large population cohorts and state-of-the-art genome technology will allow us to dissect the genetic factors that contribute to disease."

CHAVI also will establish an even larger cohort of HIV-infected patients in Africa and perform the same genetic analyses. Haplotypes, or genetic neighborhoods, are poorly known for people of African ancestry, Goldstein said. CHAVI will f
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Source:Duke University Medical Center