Some Aspects of Purine Nucleotide Metabolism in Human Lymphocytes before and after Infection with HIV-1 Virus: Nucleotide Content

Abstract

The evaluation of intracellular metabolism of purine nucleotides is important in many conditions, during, for example, proliferation, or maturation of the cell -i.e. leukemia and SCID (= severe congenital immunodeficiency)- and can be studied following different procedures:

• 1) evaluation of purine nucleotide content (1);

• 2) incorporation of labelled precursors of the purines, e.g. ¹⁴C-glycine or ¹⁴C-formate with kinetics based on biomathematical models (2);

• 3) assay of each individual enzymatic activity, involved in the various pathways of purine nucleotide metabolism, the de novo synthesis, the salvage pathway, and the purine nucleotide catabolism (2).