Poster abstracts

Poster number 58 submitted by Dominic Qualley

Nucleic acid chaperone activity of retroviral nucleocapsid proteins

Dominic F. Qualley (Departments of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Center for Retrovirus Research, The Ohio State University)

Abstract:
Nucleic acid chaperone proteins facilitate DNA and RNA rearrangements resulting in a thermodynamically more stable conformation. In retroviruses, the small, highly basic nucleocapsid (NC) protein serves as a chaperone and facilitates many nucleic acid restructuring events in the retroviral life cycle. Feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV) is a retrovirus that naturally occurs in the domestic cat and produces symptoms similar to those found in HIV-infected humans. Compared to HIV, little is known about the molecular determinants of FIV NC chaperone activity. In this work, we carry out biochemical and biophysical studies to investigate FIV NC's chaperone function. Sedimentation assays were used to characterize NC-facilitated nucleic acid aggregation, gel mobility-shift assays have measured NC-guided annealing of DNA/RNA, and fluorescence anisotropy experiments provided apparent Kd values for FIV NC binding to DNA and RNA constructs. These results are compared to biophysical data obtained from experiments using HIV-1 NC and HTLV-1 NC. Future experiments will feature mutational analysis of FIV NC followed by characterization in vitro and in cell culture.

Keywords: retrovirus, chaperone, nucleocapsid