From Judy:
In the assay that we used in the Lombardi study, shown in the top line here, we take plasma or activated -- this is dividing peripheral blood and mononuclear cells -- from the patients, and we co-culture them on the prostate cancer cell line, which was responsive to androgens and inflammatory cytokines. This is important because we know we have characterized the LTR, in Steve Goff's lab and Bob Silverman's lab, and we know that there are hormone-responsive elements there that would be an on switch to make the virus replicate more in the cells that were responsive to androgens.
Not sure how to interpret this but as I understand it the LTR contains the part of XMRV that responds to addrogens and cytokines. It sounds to me from the above quote that they might be using such cytokines and androgens to culture the virus (nor entirely sure here?).
This seems interesting as I am sure I saw somewhere along the line (I think from Sandra Ruscetti) that the hormone resonsive elements were not typical of MLV's but were on XMRV, though I dont know if that applied to the Lo/Alter strains. In a recent lecture MIkovits gave in Sweeden she said that the culture was expressing XMRV preferentially over MLV. I wonder if this is the reason why, though you think she would have said that in the talk?
In listening to the lecture Dr. Mikovits gave in Sweden, I understood her to be describing the attributes of the LNCaP cell line that led her to select it, not so much the LTR response. Her "guess" as to what cell line (LNCaP) to use as based, in part, on it's androgenic response but I can't recall why that was a criterion for a cell line so perhaps it's just my fuzzy memory. She was a bit modest in calling it a "guess". Darn good educated guess, I'd say. Too bad it won't grow the "poly" variants Lo/Alter found.