Capacity of a natural strain of woodchuck hepatitis virus, WHVNY, to induce acute infection in naive adult woodchucks.

Woodchuck hepatitis virus (WHV) is often used as surrogate to study mechanism of HBV infection. Currently, most infections are conducted using strains WHV7 or WHV8 that have very high sequence identity. This study focused on natural strain WHVNY that is more genetically distant from WHV7.

Comparison of the intrinsic dynamics of aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases.

Aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases (AARSs) are an important family of enzymes that catalyze tRNA aminoacylation reaction (Ibba and Soll in Annu Rev Biochem 2000, 69:617-650) [1]. AARSs are grouped into two broad classes (class I and II) based on sequence/structural homology and mode of their interactions with the tRNA molecule (Ibba and Soll in Annu Rev Biochem 2000, 69:617-650) [1]. As protein dynamics play an important role in enzyme function, we explored the intrinsic dynamics of these enzymes using normal mode analysis and investigated if the two classes and six subclasses (Ia-c and IIa-c) of AARSs exhibit any distinct patterns of motion.