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Nearly 37 million people worldwide are living with HIV. When the virus destroys so many immune cells that the body can’t fight off infection, AIDS will develop. The disease took the lives of more than a million people last year. A team of researchers has been working to uncover new information about a protein that regulates HIV’s capability to hijack a cell and start replicating.
Their findings point to a new avenue for developing potential strategies to thwart the virus. They used a combination of high-tech tools and techniques, including magic-angle-spinning nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and computer simulations of molecules, to examine the interactions between HIV and the host-cell protein cyclophilin A, right down to the movement of individual atoms. The team found that the infectivity of HIV is regulated by the motions of these proteins.Image credit: Polenova Lab/University of Delaware
