I was pleasantly surprised when I typed "lytic phase lysogenic phase", two phases in the "life cycle" of some viruses in the google search engine. Earlier on, I published a blog article titled "A potentially radical new approach to genetic engineering and production of precious proteins". The article in my blog came in 9th out of out of 43,800 pages found. When I typed in "lytic lysogenic phase", my blog article came in 19th out of 45,700. The blog article wasn't so much about virology, but rather harnessing the use of virus to produce precious proteins, and I noticed the rest of the websites were either academic resources or online textbooks about virology. Mine was the only blog amongst them. I understand Google utilizes the PageRank, whereby pages with the most visits will be ranked higher. I was even more surprised becacuse the blog article was published on March 23rd, 2007. I really who were the ones visiting my blog.
I would like to take my suggestion further into the B cells. It's possible to use a similar radical method of genetic engineering technique for B cells. B cells is the most ideal candidate to produce antibodies, but the problem is that one B cell can only produce one type of antibody. Thus, how to get around it? We can call upon our good tiny "friend", the Epstein Barr virus. This Epstein Barr virus is capable of infecting B cells (Wikipedia, Teramoto et al, 2000). The Epstein Barr virus is capable of entering lysogenic and lytic phase (Tsurumi, 1997). It is capable of transforming B cells into B cell lymphomas induced by the Latent Membrane Protein 1 (Specks and Strominger, 1989) and is capable of rapidly growing in in vitro cultures (Smith et al, 1987) during the latent (lysogenic phase) phase. Lytic phase can be induced, and the genes encoding the antibodies can be expressed by genetic engineering of the virus, just like how lytic phase genes can be expressed.
This can lead to the production of precious bodies, but this time, it's using a B cell lymphoma as opposed to a hyridoma.
The original packaged virus can be obtained during the lytic in certain cells be co-infection of a handicapped helper virus.
The original packaged virus can be obtained during the lytic in certain cells be co-infection of a handicapped helper virus.
Citations
1) Teramoto N, Gogolak P, Nagy N, Maeda A, Kvarnung K, Bjorkholm T, Klein E. Epstein-Barr virus-infected B-chronic lymphocyte leukemia cells express the virally encoded nuclear proteins but they do not enter the cell cycle. J Hum Virol. 2000 May-Jun;3(3):125-36.
2) Smith LJ, Braylan RC, Edmundson KB, Nutkis JE, Wakeland EK. In vitro transformation of human B-cell follicular lymphoma cells by Epstein-Barr virus. Cancer Res. 1987 Apr 15;47(8):2062-6.
3) Tsurumi T. Molecular mechanism of lytic phase of Epstein-Barr virus DNA replication. Nippon Rinsho. 1997 Feb;55(2):321-7.
4) Ragoczy T, Heston L, Miller G. The Epstein-Barr virus Rta protein activates lytic cycle genes and can disrupt latency in B lymphocytes. J Virol. 1998 Oct;72(10):7978-84.
5) Speck, S. H. & Strominger, J. L. (1989). Transcription of Epstein–Barr virus in latently infected, growth transformed lymphocytes. In Tumorigenic DNA Viruses: Advances in Viral Oncology, pp. 133-150. Edited by G. Klein. New York: Raven Press.
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