DNTP versus NTP discrimination by phenylalanine 451 in duck hepatitis B virus P protein indicates a common structure of the dNTP-binding pocket with other reverse transcriptases.

ABSTRACT: Hepatitis B viruses, or hepadnaviruses, are small DNA-containing viruses that replicate through reverse transcription. Their prototype, HBV, causes severe liver disease in humans. The hepadnaviral P protein is an unusual reverse transcriptase (RT) that initiates DNA synthesis by host-factor-dependent protein priming on a specific RNA stem-loop template, epsilon, yielding a short DNA oligonucleotide covalently attached to the RT. This priming reaction can be reconstituted with in vitro-translated duck hepatitis B virus (DHBV) P protein. No direct structural data are available for any P protein. However, P proteins share a number of conserved motifs with other polymerases. Box A contains an invariant bulky residue recently shown to be crucial for dNTP versus NTP discrimination in RTs and som

SUBMITTER: Beck J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC101827 | biostudies-literature | 2002 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature