In order to better identify compounds that can outmaneuver a virus' effort to mutate and multiply, Gregory Weiss and Allison Olszewski employed this virus, called a bacteriophage, to learn how a HIV protein could respond to a new class of anti-viral molecules they have discovered.

By constantly mutating into new variations, HIV, in particular, has been very skillful at developing resistance to broad-spectrum methods to inhibit its expansion. Because of this, the development of effective HIV drugs has been difficult and expensive.

Weiss and Olszewski found that the bacteriophage can model millions of different mutational variants of an HIV protein called Nef. Knowing how the entire population of Nef variants responds to new drugs gives researchers greater ability to identify broad-spectrum, anti-HIV compounds. This approach, Weiss said, can make drug discovery efforts for other anti-viral therapies faster and more effective.

Study results appear in online version of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

"Viruses are clever about mutating to defeat the best efforts of chemists and biologists," said Weiss, an assistant professor of chemistry and molecular biology and biochemistry. "By recruiting a harmless virus, we're learning how HIV will respond to new classes of anti-viral drugs before these compounds are tested in the clinic, which is currently an expensive and time-consuming process."

The Weiss laboratory specializes in developing massive libraries of proteins that can potentially target and bind to other proteins, using a process called phage display. In this study, Weiss and Olszewski first created one such library by attaching the Nef protein onto the bacteriophage, which was then coaxed into synthesizing the millions
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Contact: Tom Vasich
tmvasich@uci.edu
949-824-6455
University of California - Irvine
26-Aug-2005