Efficient support of virus-like particle assembly by the HIV-1 packaging signal
- National Cancer Institute, United States
Abstract
The principal structural component of a retrovirus particle is the Gag protein. Retroviral genomic RNAs contain a 'packaging signal' ('Ψ') and are packaged in virus particles with very high selectivity. However, if no genomic RNA is present, Gag assembles into particles containing cellular mRNA molecules. The mechanism by which genomic RNA is normally selected during virus assembly is not understood. We previously reported (Comas-Garcia et al., 2017) that at physiological ionic strength, recombinant HIV-1 Gag binds with similar affinities to RNAs with or without Ψ, and proposed that genomic RNA is selectively packaged because binding to Ψ initiates particle assembly more efficiently than other RNAs. We now present data directly supporting this hypothesis. We also show that one or more short stretches of unpaired G residues are important elements of Ψ; Ψ may not be localized to a single structural element, but is probably distributed over >100 bases.
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All data generated during this study are included in the manuscript and supporting files.
Article and author information
Author details
Mauricio Comas-Garcia
Funding
National Cancer Institute
- Mauricio Comas-Garcia
- Tomas Kroupa
- Siddhartha AK Datta
- Demetria P Harvin
- Wei-Shau Hu
- Alan Rein
Intramural AIDS Targeted Antiviral Therapy Program
- Mauricio Comas-Garcia
- Alan Rein
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
This is an open-access article, free of all copyright, and may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, built upon, or otherwise used by anyone for any lawful purpose. The work is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication.
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Efficient support of virus-like particle assembly by the HIV-1 packaging signal
eLife 7:e38438.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.38438
