Opinion
A cautionary tale of virus and disease
-
Correspondence: Robin A Weiss r.weiss@ucl.ac.uk
BMC Biology 2010, 8:124 doi:10.1186/1741-7007-8-124
Accesses
- Last 30 days: 94 accesses
- Last 365 days: 4295 accesses
- All time: 16298 accesses
Cited by
BioMed Central: 1 citation
|
Viewpoints
Robert A Smith Retrovirology 2010, 7:112 (20 December 2010) Efforts to assess the prevalence of xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus (XMRV) in patients with prostate cancer and chronic fatigue syndrome have relied heavily on PCR-based testing of clinical samples and have yielded widely divergent findings. This week in Retrovirology, reports from four independent research groups illustrate the extreme care needed to exclude DNA or RNA contamination in PCR analyses of XMRV. In addition, phylogenetic evidence suggesting that previously-published XMRV sequences originated from a commonly-used prostate carcinoma cell line (22Rv1) is presented. These findings raise important questions regarding the provenance of XMRV and its potential connection to human disease.
|
