Important note: Information in this article was accurate in January 1999. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.AIDSWEEKLY Plus; Monday, January 25, 1999
Daniel J. DeNoon, Senior Editor
Although it is an asymmetric cone, the HIV nucleocapsid core appears to be highly regular. This suggested to University of Utah researchers Barbie K. Ganser, Wesley I. Sundquist, and colleagues that it is constructed from a regular underlying lattice.
Similar cones are seen in elemental carbon molecules organized according to the same principals as fullerine (a.k.a. buckyball) cones.
"We propose that HIV-1 cores form cones using the same symmetry principles as carbon," Ganser et al. wrote in the journal Science ("Assembly and Analysis of Conical Models for the HIV-1 Core," Science, 1999;283:80-3).
While HIV and other lentiviruses have a conical core, other retroviruses have cylindrical or spherical cores.
"Despite this morphological diversity, it is intuitively appealing to believe that these different shapes are created using similar underlying structural principles," Ganser et al. observed. "An attractive aspect of our model is that the cores of all retroviruses could be composed of closed hexagonal lattices and differ simply in the spacing of their pentameric defects, thereby creating either spheres, cylinders, or cones."
This work was supported by grants from the NIH and from the Huntsman Cancer Institute.
The corresponding author for this study is Wesley I. Sundquist, Department of biochemistry, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 84132. Email: <wes.sundquist@hsc.utah.edu>.
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