ABSTRACT
AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) (Caution!)* is an immunosuppressive disease which has caused wide spread deaths through opportunistic infections and malignancies. A retrovirus, the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), has been identified as the aetiologic agent causing this disease and approches to development of drugs against AIDS are therefore based on finding substances which can inhibit HIV replication. There are several points at which the intervention of the replicative cycle can be carried out. The inhibition of a multifunctional enzyme, reverse transcriptase (which is a virus-specific RNA-dependent DNA polymerase) offers a possible mode of intervention of the virus life cycle since it transcribes the viral RNA genome to DNA which is ultimately incorporated as pro-viral DNA into the cellular genome. Recently a colorimetric test has been reported which is simple, sensitive and rapid involving the transformation of a tetrazolium salt to a coloured formazan derivative by living cells but not by dead cells or culture medium.
