Vulnerable targets in HIV-1 Pol for attenuation-based vaccine design.

ABSTRACT: Identification of viral immune escape mutations that compromise HIV's ability to replicate may aid rational attenuation-based vaccine design. Previously we reported amino acids associated with altered viral replication capacity (RC) from a sequence-function analysis of 487 patient-derived RT-integrase sequences. In this study, site-directed mutagenesis experiments were performed to validate the effect of these mutations on RC. Viral reverse transcripts were measured by quantitative PCR and structural modelling was performed to gain further insight into the effect of reverse transcriptase (RT) mutations on reverse transcription. RT-integrase variants in or flanking cytotoxic T cell epitopes in the RT palm (158S), RT thumb (241I and 257V) and integrase catalytic core domain (124N) were confi

SUBMITTER: Ojwach DBA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7931244 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature