Truncated cytoplasmic viral domains expose critical binding domains.(Brief Article)

1902 MAR 27 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- by Michael Greer, senior medical writer - Researchers in the United States have shown that a novel HIV mutation may be useful in the search for an HIV vaccine.

Terri G. Edwards and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, the New York University School of Medicine, and the New York Harbor Veterans Affairs Medical Center's Research Center for AIDS and HIV Infection in New York City studied an HIV mutation that enabled CD4-independent infection for some viral strains.

This mutation also shrank the outer envelope proteins of HIV, leaving critical domains exposed and unprotected, Edwards and coauthors found.

The researchers studied a CD4-independent strain of HIV (8x) with a deletion in the transmembrane domain of the envelope protein gp41. This mutation triggered a frameshift that left the cytoplasmic domain of gp41 27 amino acids short, they said.

The truncated cytoplasmic domain translated into shortened versions of the gp41 and gp120 proteins, leaving highly conserved binding domains unprotected. Monoclonal antibodies targeting these domains were much more effective against HIV envelope proteins carrying the 8x mutation, study data showed.

This mutation failed to confer CD4-independence to most of the envelope proteins it was introduced into (Truncation of the ...