Computer modeling helps a team of scientists from the University of Chicago learn how HIV forces other cells to spread the virus to other cells. The work was published yesterday and can be found in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The scientists knew that the budding during the HIV spreading process involves an HIV protein complex called Gag protein. "For a while now we have had an idea of what the final assembled structure looks like, but all the details in between remained largely unknown," said Gregory Voth, corresponding author on the paper.
To address this, Voth and his team built a computer model to simulate Gag in action. The simulations allowed them to tweak the model until they arrived at the most likely configurations for the molecular process. Once they found these configurations, the results were validated by experiments in the laboratory of Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz at the National Institutes of Health and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Janelia Research Campus.
"It really demonstrates the power of modern computing for simulating viruses," Voth said.
The team plans next to study the structures of the Gag proteins in the HIV virus capsule after budding.
Image: UChicago scientists modeled how the HIV protein Gag is involved in forcing a victim's cell to make a capsule of HIV to infect other cells, a process called "budding." Image courtesy of Voth et. al / University of Chicago.