The interplay of structure and dynamics: insights from a survey of HIV-1 reverse transcriptase crystal structures.

ABSTRACT: HIV-1 reverse transcriptase (RT) is a critical drug target for HIV treatment, and understanding the exact mechanisms of its function and inhibition would significantly accelerate the development of new anti-HIV drugs. It is well known that structure plays a critical role in protein function, but for RT, structural information has proven to be insufficient-despite enormous effort-to explain the mechanism of inhibition and drug resistance of non-nucleoside RT inhibitors. We hypothesize that the missing link is dynamics, information about the motions of the system. However, many of the techniques that give the best information about dynamics, such as solution nuclear magnetic resonance and molecular dynamics simulations, cannot be easily applied to a protein as large as RT. As an alternative,

SUBMITTER: Seckler JM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3773008 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature