Because the human immunodeficiency virus type 1 protease (HIV-1-PR) is an essential enzyme in the viral life cycle, its inhibition can control AIDS. The folding of single-domain proteins, like each of the monomers forming the HIV-1-PR homodimer, is controlled by local elementary structures (LES, folding units stabilized by strongly interacting, highly conserved, as a rule hydrophobic, amino aci...

Quantitative Structure Activity Relationship (QSAR) techniques are used routinely by computational chemists in drug discovery and development to analyze datasets of compounds. Quantitative numerical methods like Partial Least Squares (PLS) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) have been used on QSAR to establish correlations between molecular properties and bioactivity. However, ANN may be advan...

BACKGROUND Cancer and HIV/AIDS are two of the greatest public health and humanitarian challenges facing the world today. Infection with HIV not only weakens the immune system leading to AIDS and increasing the risk of opportunistic infections, but also increases the risk of several types of cancer. The enormous biodiversity of marine habitats is mirrored by the molecular diversity of secondary ...

OBJECTIVES Human papillomavirus (HPV) infection is a major risk factor for cervical disease. Using baseline data from the HIV-infected cohort of Evandro Chagas Clinical Research Institute at Fiocruz, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, factors associated with an increased prevalence of HPV were assessed. METHODS Samples from 634 HIV-infected women were tested for the presence of HPV infection using hybri...

The human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) Vif protein is specifically packaged into virus particles through an interaction with viral genomic RNA in which it associates with the viral nucleoprotein complex. We now demonstrate for the first time that virus-associated Vif is subject to proteolytic processing by the viral protease (Pr). Pr-dependent processing of Vif was observed both in viv...

To evaluate HIV-1 drug resistance-associated mutations among drug-naive HIV-1-infected patients in Northern Vietnam, we performed sequence analysis of HIV-1 pol-PR and pol-RT in samples collected from 206 (161 men and 45 women) consenting patients in 2008. From these 206 samples, we successfully sequenced 173 pol-PR and 155 pol-RT genes. Phylogenetic analysis revealed that all patients were inf...

The reading frame of the HIV-1 pol gene, encoding protease (PR) and reverse transcriptase (RT), including RNase H as well as integrase, was fused to the bacterialbeta-galactosidase gene and overexpressed in Escherichia coli cells. The resulting fusion protein was cleaved autocatalytically leading to PR, RT and integrase. Immunoprecipitations of bacterial crude extracts with anti-RT antibodies p...

OBJECTIVES HIV-1 protease inhibitors (PIs) are key components of HIV therapy. PL-100 is a novel lysine sulphonamide that demonstrates potent antiviral activity against multiresistant HIV-1 strains as well as a higher genetic barrier for development of resistance mutations compared with first-generation PIs. In the present study, we compared the antiviral activity of PL-100 against HIV-1 subtype...

INTRODUCTION Despite their perceived vulnerability to HIV, East African street youth have been neglected in HIV prevention research. We examined HIV seroprevalence and correlates of HIV infection in a sample of male street youth in Kisumu, Kenya. METHODS We enrolled a street-recruited sample of 13-21 year old street youth. Participants completed a survey followed by voluntary HIV counseling a...

Although a majority of HIV-1 infections in Brazil are caused by the subtype B virus (also prevalent in the United States and Western Europe), viral subtypes F and C are also found very frequently. Genomic differences between the subtypes give rise to sequence variations in the encoded proteins, including the HIV-1 protease. The current anti-HIV drugs have been developed primarily against subtyp...