HIV-1 Lethality and Loss of Env Protein Expression Induced by Single Synonymous Substitutions in the Virus Genome Intronic-Splicing Silencer.

ABSTRACT: Synonymous genome recoding has been widely used to study different aspects of virus biology. Codon usage affects the temporal regulation of viral gene expression. In this study, we performed synonymous codon mutagenesis to investigate whether codon usage affected HIV-1 Env protein expression and virus viability. We replaced the codons AGG, GAG, CCU, ACU, CUC, and GGG of the HIV-1 env gene with the synonymous codons CGU, GAA, CCG, ACG, UUA, and GGA, respectively. We found that recoding the Env protein gp120 coding region (excluding the Rev response element [RRE]) did not significantly affect virus replication capacity, even though we introduced 15 new CpG dinucleotides. In contrast, changing a single codon (AGG to CGU) located in the gp41 coding region (HXB2 env position 2125 to 2127), whic

SUBMITTER: Jordan-Paiz A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7565636 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature