so let's get this straight; CFS patients don't have XMRV or MLVs, but if they did, it would explain the neuromuscular pathology....

Dusty Miller, greatly respected in the retroviral community, has just published a paper in the Journal of Virology describing how, if it really existed in humans, XMRV could induce apoptosis of human neuroblastoma cells - presenting a potential mechanism for the neuromuscular pathology seen in patients with chronic fatigue syndrome.  I don't normally blog about XMRV or other MLVs that might be capable of infecting humans - but we did just publish a paper showing how easy it would be to get false-negative results when attempting to PCR amplify the GAG region of viruses like these, which would be especially relevant if the titer or copy number of the virus in various tissues was low.  While several journals considered this scientifically worthy work, they all thought the "interest" in this paper would be low.  By publishing in an open access journal, we've now had 850 accesses to our paper in 3 weeks - suggesting at least some people are in fact interested in it.  I then wonder if anyone actually did find polytropic/xenotropic MLVs in human disease, would they be able to publish it? Would it not get held back by virtue of the already published negative data, which in most cases was poorly controlled for or maybe not the appropriate source of tissue?  Just a thought.  It just seems highly coincidental that the virus (family) that apparently is so ubiquitous in the lab - from reported contamination in heparin blood tubes to DNA extraction kits...can in some cases infect human cells...and can reproduce the symptoms seen in CFS patients, whom at one point were thought to carry the virus.  Its just a thought...you can read the paper, an epub, here - Xpr1 is an Atypical G-protein Coupled Receptor that Mediates Xenotropic and Polytropic Murine Retrovirus Neurotoxicity