AIDS research has been hampered because mice, which usually provide an excellent model for studying human disease, cannot be infected with HIV. Now, researchers have created a modified HIV strain that can infect mice.Dr. Mary Jane Potash, at Columbia University Medical Center in New York, and colleagues swapped the HIV gene that encodes a surface protein called gp120, which recognizes human cells, with a gene for gp80 from a mouse leukemia virus.The resulting “chimeric” virus, dubbed EcoHIV, infects about 75 percent of mice tested -- an efficiency that is comparable to that of HIV in humans, the team report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
