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According to a new study published in Cell, a component of semen may ease the spread of the virus locating immune system cells, possibly making the pathogen up to a hundred thousand times more dangerous.

German scientists originally set to see if semen contained things that inhibited the HIV infection. HIV, the virus that leads to AIDS, infected 60 million people worldwide since its discovery in 1981. Transmission from sexual intercourse is estimated at one in every 200 to 2,000 acts.

German scientist, Kirchhoff, and his team ran across many proteins found in semen in a search for potential enhancers of HIV. The factors uncovered were a protein called prostatic acid phosphatase that is found in the prostate gland. Analysis of the peptide's structure in semen showed that it joined similar peptides to create amyloid fibers, also found in Alseimers. The scientists call the amyloid fibers semen-derived enhancer of virus infection or SEVI. If they do not link to become fibers the peptides remain inactive and do not enhance transmission.

Combined, these fibers then trap and shuttle HIV particles to human cells. The researchers found that HIV in human semen was more successful than without semen at infecting cells and immune system cells that are the infection's first targets in the body. They also tested the threshold of virus needed to infect human tonsil cells, noting that in the presence of semen, far fewer HIV particles were needed for transmission.

This team injected both the plain virus and SEVI-enhanced HIV into the tails of rats that had been given human immune system cells. The HIV with the semen was 5x more effective in spreading the virus. SEVI makes HIV up to 100,000 times more likely to spread when compared with the virus alone.

Nadia Roan and Warner Greene state "If SEVI truly increases the real world heterosexual spread of HIV by several orders of magnitude, then negating...