What happens once HIV gets inside a cell

Once a virus firmly attaches itself to a CD4 cell it passes through the surface of the cell into the inside. Then, the outer shell of the virus breaks open and the contents of the virus gets mixed with the contents of the cell. As soon as things mix together the cell starts to work differently, and not in a good way.

Your cells use the DNA of your genome as a kind of blueprint or instruction manual. DNA actually has instructions for building different proteins .

When one of your cells needs to build a particular protein, it starts by finding the DNA instructions for that protein and making a copy of them, a step called transcription . The copy is made of RNA , a chemical very similar to DNA. The cell then builds the new protein according to the instructions in the RNA.

Suppose you wanted to cook something special like a pumpkin pie, but you didn’t have a recipe. You could:

1. Go to a library and find the recipe in a reference book (the DNA).
2. Write out a copy of the recipe on a piece of paper (the RNA) and bring it home.
3. Follow the recipe to make the pie (the protein).

This is all happening very fast, all the time, in all of your cells. All you need to remember is this: cells copy DNA instructions into RNA instructions, and cells follow RNA instructions to build proteins.

When HIV gets inside a cell, the cell starts making proteins according to the directions in the HIV genome. These HIV proteins are of no use to the cell but are used instead to create more HIV viruses.

Some of these HIV proteins hook together to form the protein shell of a new virus. Inside this new virus shell is a copy of the HIV genome and a few proteins that the virus needs to reproduce.

Every eight to 12 hours the cell makes hundreds, even thousands of copies of the HIV virus. The cell acts like a photocopier, copying the same page over and over. These new viruses push through the surface of the cell and float freely in the blood where they may infect other CD4 cells. Within a day or two, the infected cell dies.

This is the end of the section, HIV under the microscope. In the next section, HIV in people, you’ll read about what it means to have an HIV infection, and some of the problems people living with HIV and AIDS must face.

Coming up next, the section quiz.