Glossary

AIDS: Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. An advanced stage of a viral infection caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

Antibodies: Proteins produced by the immune system to fight infectious agents, such as viruses

B lymphocytes: White blood cells that mature in the bone marrow and produce antibodies; also called B cells.

Capsid: protein coat that surrounds a virus

CD4: A protein displayed on the surface of a certain human immune cells. HIV recognizes, attaches to the protein on surface of a cell.

Enzymes: proteins that regulate the rate of chemical reactions

HIV: The human immunodeficiency virus, a retrovirus recognized as the cause of AIDS

Immunity: The body's ability to resist infection

Lymphocytes: White blood cells that play a key role in the body's disease-fighting immune response

Lymphocytes: White blood cells that play key roles in the body's immune defenses; The two main types of lymphocytes are B lymphocytes (also called B cells) and T lymphocytes (also called T cells)

Macrophages: Specialized white blood cells that play many roles in the immune response, including engulfing and digesting bacteria and other microbes, alerting other immune cells, and producing chemicals needed for immune responses to disease threats

Protease inhibitors: Drugs that suppress HIV replication by interfering with an HIV enzyme called protease

Protein: polypeptide chains that have taken their structural formation

Retrovirus: viruses that use an enzyme called reverse transcriptase to make a DNA complement of their RNA.

Reverse transcriptase: An HIV enzyme that the virus requires to reproduce itself

Translation: creation of polypeptide strand from mRNA with the use of minoacyl-tRNA

Transcription: creation of a mRNA strand from a DNA strand with a protein called transcriptase.

T lymphocytes: A family of specialized white blood cells that help orchestrate the body's immune responses and attack cells that are infected or cancerous

Virus: A disease-causing microbe that can replicate only in the living cells of other organisms