We report on a 6 year old boy with severe MPS II undergoing immune modulation therapy due to high IgG antibody titers to IV idursulfase and no significant decline in urinary GAG levels since initiating enzyme replacement therapy. He has complete deficiency of iduronate-2-sulfatase activity due to a submicroscopic deletion of the X chromosome involving the entire I2S gene but not including in th...

HIV-1 genetic diversity among circulating strains presents a major challenge for HIV-1 vaccine development, particularly for developing countries where less sequence information is available. To identify representative viruses for inclusion in candidate vaccines targeted for South Africa, we applied an efficient sequence survey strategy to samples from recently and chronically infected persons ...

Dynamic loading and perfusion culture environments alone are known to enhance cartilage extracellular matrix (ECM) production in dedifferentiated articular chondrocytes. In this study, we explored whether a combination of these factors would enhance these processes over a free-swelling (FS) condition using adult human articular chondrocytes embedded in 2% alginate. The alginate constructs were ...

We have examined the influence of RNA upon the interaction of Gag-Pol with Gag during human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) assembly. COS7 cells were transfected with protease-negative HIV-1 proviral DNA, and Gag/Gag-Pol complexes were detected by coimmunoprecipitation with anti-integrase. In COS7 cells, Gag/Gag-Pol is found almost entirely in pelletable, membrane-bound complexes. Exposur...

The nucleotide sequence of a feline v-myc gene and feline leukemia virus (FeLV) flanking regions was determined. Both the nucleotide and predicted amino acid sequences are very similar to the murine and human c-myc genes (ca. 90% identity). The entire c-myc coding sequence is represented in feline v-myc and replaces portions of the gag and env genes and the entire pol gene. The coding sequence ...

Background: The quantitative assays are important tests in the management of patients with HIV-1/AIDS. The important step in developing the assay is the availability of the standard HIV-1 RNA. For this purpose, we optimized in vitro HIV-1 RNA transcription to produce the standard HIV-1 RNA. Methods: The HIV-1 DNA was amplifi ed from pNL43 by PCR using a primer pair that was specifi c for conser...

Synthesis of HIV GagPol involves a proportion of ribosomes translating a U6A shift site at the distal end of the gag gene performing a programmed -1 ribosomal frameshift event to enter the overlapping pol gene. In vitro studies here show that at the same shift motif HIV reverse transcriptase generates -1 and +1 indels with their ratio being sensitive to the relative concentration ratio of dNTPs...

The amino- and carboxyl-terminal amino acid sequences of proteins (p10, p12, p15, and p30) coded by the gag gene of Rauscher and AKR murine leukemia viruses were determined. Among these proteins, p15 from both viruses appears to have a blocked amino end. Proline was found to be the common NH(2) terminus of both p30s and both p12s, and alanine of both p10s. The amino-terminal sequences of p30s a...

How retroviral Gag proteins recognize the packaging signals (Psi) on their genomic RNA (gRNA) is a key question that we addressed here using Mason-Pfizer monkey virus (MPMV) as model system by combining band-shift assays and footprinting experiments. Our data show Pr78Gag selects gRNA against spliced viral simultaneously binding to two single stranded loops MPMV Psi RNA: (1) large purine loop (...

We have purified from Moloney murine leukemia virus (Mo-MuLV) a protease that has the capacity of accurately cleaving the polyprotein precursor Pr65gag into the mature viral structural proteins. Both the NH2- and COOH-terminal amino acid sequences have been determined and aligned with the amino acid sequence deduced from the DNA sequence of Mo-MuLV by other workers. The results show that: (i) t...