NIH Centers to Study Structural Biology of HIV

 

The following text was modified from the NIH news announcement at

http://www.nigms.nih.gov/news/results/hivcenter_080727.htm

Alan Frankel’s University of California San Francisco HIV Accessory and Regulatory Complexes (HARC) Center will develop new tools and methods to create a complete picture of HIV-host cell interactions occurring during the early phases of the virus’s life cycle. The center will focus on key HIV proteins that perform important regulatory and accessory functions.

Visit the HARC Center website at http://harc.ucsf.edu/

Angela Gronenborn’s University of Pittsburgh Center for HIV Protein Interactions will specialize in developing a structure determination pipeline to image pivotal events occurring right after the virus fuses with the host cell. The center will establish a framework for computationally predicting important cellular partners for HIV and for experimentally validating such predictions.

Wesley Sundquist’s University of Utah Structural Biology Center for HIV/Host Interactions in Trafficking and Assembly will analyze HIV molecular complexes and determine how they interact with and commandeer cellular machinery to traffic throughout the cell and form new virus particles. By visually reconstructing various elements of virus particle assembly and trafficking, the center aims to develop HIV into a model for studying how other human viruses interact with cellular hosts.

New methodologies and tools developed by the centers will be available to the research community at large. The centers also will collaborate with other scientists engaged in structural and functional studies of HIV, including researchers funded by NIAID through a coordinated funding program.