Background The introduction of HAART has significantly prolonged the life span of HIV-infected patients. However, the error-prone nature of HIV-1 reverse transcriptase (HIV-1 RT) results in the emergence of drug-resistant viruses and threatens the effectiveness of HAART. HIV-1 RT is a primary target of two classes of drugs: nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NRTIs) and non-nucleoside ...

Infectious bursal disease (IBD) is an immunosuppressive, acute and highly contagious illness of growing-poultry stock infected with infectious bursal disease virus (IBDV). It is common in Pakistan, causing potential economic losses throughout the year. The objective of the study is to propose a rapid, sensitive and specific diagnostic tool, and compare it with existing commonly used reverse tra...

Background and Aims: Plant certification programs need reliable, fast, cheap and sensitive methods for detection of systemic pathogens with special interest in virus and viroid detection. Reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) has been documented as an alternative assay for certification of plant propagating materials. The main object of the present study was the optimization ...

Reverse transcriptase-PCR (RT-PCR) is a powerful tool for gene expression analysis at the RNA level, primarily due to its sensitivity, speed, ease of use, and versatility. In a typical RT-PCR procedure, a reverse transcriptase is used to generate a complementary DNA (cDNA) copy of RNA molecules, followed by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to amplify the cDNA. Since the PCR process part is usual...

The title compound, C(18)H(15)ClN(2)O(2), is a potential human immunodeficiency virus type-1 (HIV-1) non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor. The pyrrolidine ring adopts an envelope and the diazepine ring a boat conformation. In the crystal structure, two isomers (R and S) form centrosymmetric dimers via N-H⋯O hydrogen bonds.

MicroRNAs are small non-coding RNAs that inhibit the translation of target mRNAs. In humans, most microRNAs are transcribed by RNA polymerase II as long primary transcripts and processed by sequential cleavage of the two RNase III enzymes, DROSHA and DICER, into precursor and mature microRNAs, respectively. Although the fundamental functions of microRNAs in RNA silencing have been gradually unc...

substantial progress continues to be made in the arena of antiretroviral drug development. prn is again proud to present its annual review of the experimental agents to watch for in the coming months and years. This year’s review is based on a lecture by Dr. Roy M. Gulick, a longtime friend of prn, and no stranger to the antiretroviral development pipeline. To date, twenty-two antiretrovirals h...

We have constructed a plasmid that, when introduced into Escherichia coil, induces the synthesis of large quantities of a protein with an apparent molecular mass of 66 kDa that differs from human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) RNA-dependent DNA polymerase (deoxynucleoside-triphosphate:DNA deoxynucleotidyltransferase or reverse transcriptase, EC 2.7.7.49) only in that it has two additional aminote...

We have analyzed the processing of the RNA primer for (+) strand DNA synthesis by reverse transcriptase of the human immunodeficiency virus 1. To test for specific RNA cleavage and primer usage, we constructed a 99-base pair RNA-DNA hybrid containing the viral polypurine tract and flanking viral sequences. Although the RNase H activity of reverse transcriptase cleaves the RNA strand into multip...