Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome or AIDS was first recognized in the early 1980s. Within a few years of its discovery, scientists had identified the virus that causes it, called the Human Immunodeficiency Virus or HIV. Through the 1980s and early 1990s, the HIV/AIDS epidemic grew steadily, with the number of affected people and the number of deaths increasing every year. By the late 1990s it was causing millions of deaths per year worldwide, and had a prevalence of more than 20% in the adult population of some countries.
An epidemic of this magnitude requires multiple types of response. One approach has been to limit the spread of the disease through education, for example, by encouraging the use of condoms and discouraging drug users from sharing needles. A second approach has been to carry out research into the basic biology of HIV in an effort to develop better treatments or even a vaccine.
The programming problems for this section are connected with basic research into HIV. They involve predicting the RNA secondary structure in a single gene from the HIV genome. We’ll talk about secondary structure and its prediction shortly. But first, let’s briefly discuss HIV’s genome and life cycle.
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