I went to the Mayer lecture with Professor Kathleen Collins, M.D./Ph.D. today, where she gave a talk on her work with molecular interactions behind HIV virulence. She worked primarily with an accessory protein, NEF, coded by HIV genes, that interacted with AP-1 and reduces surface expression of MHC-1 and phosphorylation. The way they studied this, however, was through knock-outs! I’m pretty sure most of us have gone through genetics, so siRNA shouldn’t be a new concept, but I’ll reiterate: siRNA is “small, interfering RNA,” and the presence of siRNA in a cell signals a problem with the gene it encodes, and so all transcripts of that gene are destroyed, leading to downregulation of that gene. Dr. Collins knocked out AP-1 in her studies in order to see how NEF and MHC-1 interacted without it. She did some amazing work, you should check out her papers! I’m putting one on antigens, which I think we could get a lot out of, after taking this class, below.
http://www.jbc.org/content/280/13/12840.full