The crystal structures of the proteases (PRs) encoded by the Rous sarcoma virus (RSV) and the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) have been compared. The crystallographic monomer of HIV PR superimposes on the two crystallographically independent subunits of the RSV PR dimer with root mean square deviations of 1.45 and 1.55 A for 86 and 88 common C alpha atoms, respectively. There is a conserved ...

The coalescence of the HIV-1 and tuberculosis (TB) epidemics in Sub-Saharan Africa has had a significant and negative impact on global health. The availability of effective antimicrobial treatment for both HIV-1 (in the form of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART)) and TB (with antimycobacterial agents) has the potential to mitigate the associated morbidity and mortality. However, the u...

The detection of polymorphisms associated to HIV-1 drug-resistance and genetic subtypes is important for the control and treatment of HIV-1 disease. Drug pressure selects resistant variants that carry mutations in the viral reverse transcriptase (RT) and protease (PR) genes. For a contribution to the public health authorities in planning the availability of therapeutic treatment, we therefore d...

To better understand the emergence of HIV-1 variants in Barbados and the association with transmission modes, we analyzed phylogenetic relationships and genetic variability among HIV-1 strains collected in 1996 from 36 antiretroviral therapy-naive patients. Only subtype B variants were present in this sampling, based on analysis of HIV-1 envelope (env) C2V3, protease (PR), and reverse transcrip...

Proteolytic processing of Gag and Gag-Pol polyproteins by the viral protease (PR) is crucial for the production of infectious HIV-1, and inhibitors of the viral PR are an integral part of current antiretroviral therapy. The process has several layers of complexity (multiple cleavage sites and substrates; multiple enzyme forms; PR auto-processing), which calls for a systems level approach to ide...

Previous studies revealed that HIV-1 CRF01_AE viruses derived from antiretroviral drug-naïve Thai patients contained several protease (PR) inhibitor (PI) resistance-associated mutations. In this report, we examined the sustained appearance of drug resistance-associated mutations in CRF01_AE PR and reverse transcriptase (RT). Peripheral blood samples were collected every 3 months from April 2008...

Inhibition of HIV-1 protease (HIV-PR), the aspartic protease that cleaves specific amide bonds in precursor gag-pol proteins to form the mature proteins needed for production of infectious human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) particles,' is regarded as a promising approach for treating acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) and related diseases. Tight-binding inhibitors of HIV-PR have been dis...

The main problems found in designing drugs are those of optimizing the drug-target interaction and of avoiding the insurgence of resistance. We suggest a scheme for the design of inhibitors that can be used as leads for the development of a drug and that do not face either of these problems, and then apply it to the case of HIV-1-PR. It is based on the knowledge that the folding of single-domai...

We and others have presented evidence for a direct interaction between the matrix (MA) domain of the human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) Gag protein and the cytoplasmic tail of the transmembrane envelope (Env) glycoprotein gp41. In addition, it has been postulated that the MA domain of Gag undergoes a conformational change following Gag processing, and the cytoplasmic tail of gp41 has b...

The structure of HIV protease (HIV Pr) bound to JE-2147 (also named AG1776 or KNI-764) is determined here to 1.09 A resolution. This highest-resolution structure for HIV Pr allows refinement of anisotropic displacement parameters (ADPs) for all atoms. Clustering based on the directional information in ADPs defines two sets of subdomains such that within each set, subdomains undergo similar anis...