This article is part of the supplement: Frontiers of Retrovirology: Complex retroviruses, retroelements and their hosts .

Poster presentation

A new role of the HIV-1 nucleocapsid in the spatiotemporal control of the reverse transcription throughout the virus replication cycle

Bing Yu^1,2, Laurent Houzet^1,3, Ludovic Didierlaurent¹, Célia Chamontin¹, Zakia Morichaud¹, Jean Luc Darlix⁴ and Marylène Mougel¹

¹  CNRS UMR 5236-UMI/UMII, CPBS - Equipe «Assemblage et Réplication des Rétrovirus», Institut de Biologie, Montpellier, France

²  Department of Pathogen Biology, Tongji Medical College of Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, PR China

³  Molecular Virology Section, Laboratory of Molecular Microbiology National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland 20892, USA

⁴  LaboRetro, Unité de Virologie humaine INSERM U758, IFR128, ENS, 46 allée d'Italie, Lyon, France

corresponding author email

from Frontiers of Retrovirology: Complex retroviruses, retroelements and their hosts
Montpellier, France. 21-23 September 2009

Retrovirology 2009, 6(Suppl 2):P14doi:10.1186/1742-4690-6-S2-P14

Published:	24 September 2009

First paragraph (this article has no abstract)

Retroviral nucleocapsid (NC) is multifunctional in that it acts throughout the virus replication cycle via a number of molecular interactions. During the early stage, mature NC molecules extensively interact with the viral genome and reverse transcriptase to chaperone proviral DNA synthesis. At the late stage, NC as part of Gag, selects and dimerizes the genomic RNA, which is thought to start the Gag assembly process in infected cells. Interestingly, the RT reaction appears to be tightly controlled during the late steps of HIV-1 replication since the viral DNA synthesis is completed only after virions infect target cells [1]. How this is regulated is yet poorly understood and we hypothesized that the NC might be involved in the timing of RT. To function, NC needs its two conserved CCHC zinc fingers and the flanking basic residues. Therefore, we investigated their role in the temporal control of the RT.