It has been proposed that the ectodomain of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) gp41 (e-gp41), involved in HIV entry into the target cell, exists in at least two conformations, a pre-hairpin intermediate and a fusion-active hairpin structure. To obtain more information on the structure-sequence relationship in e-gp41, we performed in silico a full single-amino-acid substitution analysis, resulting in a Fold Compatible Database (FCD) for each conformation. The FCD contains for each residue position in a given protein a list of values assessing the energetic compatibility (ECO) of each of the 20 natural amino acids at that position.
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