In article <362D665E.EBCB7BD9 at aspect.com.au>,
Nick Wilson <nick.wilson at aspect.com.au> wrote:
>A quick question, I've always thought HIV was related to Hepatitus B in
>some way, but someone told me that this was not so. Are they ?
They're both viruses. They both have a reverse transcriptase. Other than
that, they're not related. HepB is a hepadnavirus, HIV is a retrovirus;
HBV has a (mostly) DNA genome of around 3200 base pairs, HIV has an RNA
genome of around 10,000 base pairs; and at the protein level there is
little if any sequence similarity, other than the obvious (e.g. conserved
reverse transcriptase motifs).
The fact that both do use reverse transcriptase may have been what you
were thinking about, but that doesn't mean they're more than very, very
distantly related.
Ian
--
Ian York (iayork at panix.com) <http://www.panix.com/~iayork/>
"Bring back the Vicki Robinson .sig virus!" - Cindy Kandolf
