The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is a sly invader: It goes straight to the very immune cells meant to protect against infection, slips inside through the cells’ outer defenses and hijacks the cells’ machinery to make copies of itself. To seek out and infect those immune cells, the virus uses three-part protein complexes: the HIV spikes that are strategically placed around its outer envelope. This protein complex has been very well studied, says Dr. Ron Diskin, who recently joined the Weizmann Institute’s Structural Biology Department, but, surprisingly, no one has yet managed to solve the crystal structure of the entire complex. That is because the complex is almost entirely covered in flexible sugar molecules that hinder structural studies. One of the first tasks that Diskin is setting himself in his Weizmann lab is to find a way to reveal the atomic structure of the spike complex.
Posted on: Sun, 14 Jul 2013 18:34:47 +0000
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