Related papers: In vitro protease cleavage and computer simulation…
A biomimetic minimalist model membrane was used to study the mechanism and kinetics of cell-free in vitro HIV-1 Gag budding from a giant unilamellar vesicle (GUV). Real time interaction of Gag, RNA and lipid leading to the formation of…
Budding from the plasma membrane of the host cell is an indispensable step in the life cycle of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), which belongs to a large family of enveloped RNA viruses, retroviruses. Unlike regular enveloped…
Understanding the pathways by which viral capsid proteins assemble around their genomes could identify key intermediates as potential drug targets. In this work we use computer simulations to characterize assembly over a wide range of…
We model the spontaneous assembly of a capsid (a virus's closed outer shell) from many copies of identical units, using entirely irreversible steps and only information local to the growing edge. Our model is formulated in terms of (i) an…
HIV-1, an enveloped RNA virus, produces viral particles that are known to be much more heterogeneous in size than is typical of non-enveloped viruses. We present here a novel strategy to study HIV-1 Viral Like Particles (VLP) assembly by…
The formation of a viral capsid -- the highly-ordered protein shell that surrounds the genome of a virus -- is the canonical example of self-assembly. The capsids of many positive-sense RNA viruses spontaneously assemble from in vitro…
We consider self-assembly of proteins into a virus capsid by the methods of molecular dynamics. The capsid corresponds either to SPMV or CCMV and is studied with and without the RNA molecule inside. The proteins are flexible and described…
HIV-1 protease represents an appealing system for directed enzyme re-design, since it has various different endogenous targets, a relatively simple structure and it is well studied. Recently Chaudhury and Gray (Structure (2009) 17: 1636 --…
HIV-1 can disseminate between susceptible cells by two mechanisms: cell-free infection following fluid-phase diffusion of virions and by highly-efficient direct cell-to-cell transmission at immune cell contacts. The contribution of this…
In many viruses, hundreds of proteins assemble an outer shell (capsid) around the viral nucleic acid to form an infectious virion. How the assembly process selects the viral genome amidst a vast excess of diverse cellular nucleic acids is…
Simple RNA viruses self-assemble spontaneously and encapsulate their genome into a shell called the capsid. This process is mainly driven by the attractive electrostatic interaction between the positive charges on capsid proteins and the…
Infection by many viruses begins with fusion of viral and cellular lipid membranes, followed by entry of viral contents into the target cell and ultimately, after many biochemical steps, integration of viral DNA into that of the host cell.…
We consider a general mathematical model of a within-host viral infection with $n$ virus strains and explicit age-since-infection structure for infected cells. In the model, multiple virus strains compete for a population of target cells.…
HIV virus replication is a time-related process that includes several stages. Focusing on the core steps, RNA polymerase II transcripts in an early stage pre-mRNA containing regulator proteins (i.e nef,tat,rev,vif,vpr,vpu), which are…
Recent work has shown that the hydrophobic protein surfaces in aqueous solution sit near a drying transition. The tendency for these surfaces to expel water from their vicinity leads to self assembly of macromolecular complexes. In this…
Atomic Force Microscopy was utilized to study the morphology of Gag, {\Psi}RNA, and their binding complexes with lipids in a solution environment with 0.1{\AA} vertical and 1nm lateral resolution. TARpolyA RNA was used as a RNA control. The…
$\textbf{Background:}$ High mutability of HIV is the driving force of antiretroviral drug resistance, which represents a medical care challenge. $\textbf{Method and Model Equation:}$ To detect the mutability of each gene in the HIV-1…
We report a first in modeling and simulation of the effects of the HIV proteins on the (caspase dependent) apoptotic pathway in infected cells. This work is novel and is an extension on the recent reports and clarifications on the FAS…
One way in which the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV-1) replicates within a host is by infecting activated CD4+ T-cells, which then produce additional copies of the virus. Even with the introduction of antiretroviral drug therapy, which…
HIV-1 infection currently cannot be cured because the virus persists as integrated proviral DNA in long-lived cells despite years of suppressive antiretroviral therapy (ART). To characterize establishment, turnover, and evolution of viral…