Is High-Tech View of HIV Too Good to Be True?

摘要

Structural biologists over the past 15 years have used increasingly sophisticated tools to offer fantastically detailed views of HIV's surface proteins. On 11 June online, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) published the most exquisite yet, showing the molecular architecture of the proteins in the finest resolution ever. It comes from a prominent research group and promises to guide HIV vaccine design for years. If it is right.Several respected HIV/AIDS researchers are wowed by the work. But others— structural biologists in particular—assert that the paper is too good to be true and is more likely fantasy than fantastic. "That paper is complete rubbish," charges Richard Henderson, an electron microscopy pioneer at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, U.K. "It has no redeeming features whatsoever."