Advances in understanding the initiation of HIV-1 reverse transcription.

Curr Opin Struct Biol

Department of Structural Biology, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94305, USA. Electronic address:

Published: December 2020

Many viruses, including Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), use RNA as their genetic material. How viruses harness RNA structure and RNA-protein interactions to control their replication remains obscure. Recent advances in the characterization of HIV-1 reverse transcriptase, the enzyme that converts its single-stranded RNA genome into a double-stranded DNA copy, reveal how the reverse transcription complex evolves during initiation. Here we highlight these advances in HIV-1 structural biology and discuss how they are furthering our understanding of HIV and related ribonucleoprotein complexes implicated in viral disease.

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http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9973426PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.sbi.2020.07.005DOI Listing

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