If you are talking about natural retroviruses , they would try to
protect "their" cell from invaders (e.g. through decreasing the amount of
receptor protein available on the cell surface). However, this protection
is not absolute and works mostly against the viruses that use the same
receptor protein.
If you are talking about replication deficient retroviral vectors, they
normally have no means of preventing superinfection. Thus, the same cell
has a good chance to get infected again and again. In fact, we can easily
detect multi-copy integration (sometimes ~ 10 proviruses) at less then 100%
transduced populations. We have some data indicating that a cell that has
propensity to be infected readily takes several viruses, while its
"incompetent" neighbors get none.
Eugene.
TIM wrote:
> Please, is there anybody who can tell me, whether a human cell can be
> transduced (during a retroviral transduction process) by more than one
> copy of the retroviral construct or if the cell,once transduced, become
> refractory to another 'infection'?
>> Thanks a lot
