retrovirus

RetroSense Therapeutics, a biotechnology company dedicated to developing gene therapy approaches to vision restoration, announced today that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued a Notice of Allowance for U.S. patent application (No. 12/299,574), which broadly covers methods of restoring visual responses with a variety of optogenetic compounds.

Retroviral particles typically comprise two identical copies of single-stranded, positive sense RNA as a genome, ranging between 7 – 10 kb, which is contained within a protein shell (capsid). The capsid is surrounded by a lipid membrane from which extrudes envelope glycoproteins resulting in a total particle size between 90 and 140 mm. It is the envelope proteins that confer retroviral specificity, as they are responsible for attachment to the target cell allowing for virus internalisation. The envelope-dependent tropism of retroviruses is commonly categorised into three groups; ecotropic (infects murine cells only), xenotropic (infects all cell types except those of murine origin) and amphotropic (infects cells of both murine and non-murine lineage).