e envelope protein. (About Biotech) Not all of the fresh RNA molecules are translated into new molecules; many must be saved to be incorporated into new virus particles. Once assembled, the new particle is ejected from the cytoplasm of the host cell, going on to infect other, new host.Many factors make a retrovirus the perfect tool in up and coming medicine. As long as the virus can be effectively harnessed, it could do work that was before thought impossible. A virus, when engineered correctly, could easily correct many genetic disorders in humans and other mammals. Only one man-made virus is needed to produce large quantities of the new virus or protein that the virus encodes for. It could be injected into a particular mass of host cells and it would spark a chain reaction that would infect and genetically alter all the cells it could reach. With today's technology, custom-built RNA molecules could be inserted into retroviruses and sent easily to a place where they are needed. A virus could be produced to do anything that the "programmer" needed it to. Many helpful retroviruses are made by simply modifying existing viruses to deliver a new genome. Of course, any retroviruses used in medicine are modified so that they will not cause disease.Although they might not cause disease, these retroviruses still may trigger an immune response in the "infected" individual. This brings up another advantage of retroviruses. In a normal immune response, the virus load is lower and eventually extinguished by the immune. However, this cannot happen until the immune system adapts new antibodies to destroy the virus. The advantage with a retrovirus is that although the virus load may be decreased at first, the viral diversity is in turn increased. This leaves the immune system constantly trying to adapt to new viral codes. (Nowak) By the time the immune system has caught up, the virus has completed its job.With all the retroviruses tha...
