New Project

I have never talked about my new research project in the lab and my new, new research project that I came up with on my own. Right now is a very exciting time in our HIV lab. We have a lot of new projects going on that are going to provide some answers to the mysteries behind HIV. My project consists of looking at CD21 and CD32 receptors on FDCs (follicular dendritic cells) and how they promote HIV infectivity. This can led to possible treatments of an HIV infection with these receptors. This project will also get a paper out of it that I will be a co-author on. It is a very fun project and I have already been learning a lot from it. I also get to cut up tonsils to harvest cells and work directly with HIV. Here's to the hope that I don't actually contaminate myself with it... knock on wood.

Because I have learned so much already from my project and immunology class, I started asking questions about some different things to Dr. Burton. I learned a lot from my discussion with him and I came up with a project idea with a little help from him. As I was asking questions about CD4+ T cell infectivity in the germinal centers (where FDCs are present), he told me about a type of CD4+ T cell that gets infected, but does not create more virus. We then had a discussion as to why it doesn't happen. This led to him asking me what I would do to test this situation. I told him my ideas and he agreed with me. If we figure how these CD4+ cells get infected, but do not create more virus, we could possibly come up with a treatment that would turn off infected cells. By turning off the cells the virus would not proliferate and then it would eventually die within the body. This could be another possible treatment! The best part is that it is my own ideas that pushed this project forward and I would be the primary author of the paper! We'll see if this happens and I get any results or not.