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I would guess they would publish Bagni - since she is providing new evidence...I asked Dr. Mikovits about that - she just emailed me that their email server has been down for a couple of days - and she would get back to me when she can.
I'm sure the publication of a Bagni paper would be a big boost..
It would be an enormous advance if they have found a way to measure viral load, but I'm confused as to how they could, considering the difficulties of detecting XMRV due to the apparently very low copy numbers in the blood.
I think we are all getting antsy about this but I rather she spend time doing the science to make her paper more solid and set a new benchmark instead of rushing to publication.Where the heck are the Singh/Bateman XMRV studies already?!!?
I think we are all getting antsy about this but I rather she spend time doing the science to make her paper more solid and set a new benchmark instead of rushing to publication.
Finding a cell line that will grow a virus is often not easy but they got luckywhen it turned out that Dr. Mikovits hunch about a T-cell Lymphoma cell line defective in producing the interferons and that was susceptible to androgens which effect prostate tissues). Luckily she guessed right - its not always easy to find the right cell line - and the WPI was off and growing the virus. This is still the only cell line known that XMRV proliferates in.
"The main problem with Hue et al. is they propose that XMRV is a mouse virus, but I have looked at all of the mouse sequencing data available, and can find no copy of XMRV in the genome of any mouse sequenced to date. That includes the 129x1 strain mentioned in their paper. Sure one can find snippets of DNA that look similar to regions of XMRV, but nothing very extensive."
I think we are all getting antsy about this but I rather she spend time doing the science to make her paper more solid and set a new benchmark instead of rushing to publication.
The factor she keyed in on was the number of times a sample has been frozen and thawed and then refrozen. She said “if you're looking for a retrovirus and a sample has been thawed and refrozen that will break up the nucleic acids and you won't be held to find the retrovirus again”. It appears that freezing and thawing and then testing is okay but freezing and thawing and then freezing and thawing and retesting again is not okay.
'This gives me an uncomfortable sense of dj vu. I remember that Elaine DeFreitas said the same thing about her retrovirus. She said that when samples were frozen and thawed, the strands of DNA would begin to break into tiny pieces, and then PCR wouldn't work. You couldn't amplify it. The CDC kept freezing their samples, even after Dr DeFreitas told them they shouldn't. The CDC said it would only be a problem if the virus were found in very low copy numbers.
So here we are 20 years later, dealing with a retrovirus found in very low copy numbers. We've got a lab that's consistantly finding this retrovirus in CFS patients, and a CDC that is consistantly not finding it, and now the researcher who is finding it starts saying it's important not to freeze & thaw the samples. This is beginning to feel like a recurrent nightmare.
And STILL no one has done a true replication study, using the WPI's techniques...
That is my preference.
Going back to the point that XMRV might not be an acitve mouse retrovirus, where did the XMRV in the human cell line 22Rv1 come from? It's been assumed XRMV was picked up when the cell line was xenografted onto mice (in 1999, I think), as part of the development of that cell line. But wait, 22Rv1 is a human PROSTATE CANCER cell line, so maybe the XMRV is of human not mouse origin, and was in the cell line all along? I'm pretty sure this has been speculated on in another forum (by Bob and Marco?) but didn't really take it in as it was over my head. Actually, my heads spinning so i'll leave it there.