Protein Starves HIV, Thus Protecting Cells

A protein called SAMHD1 has been found to starve HIV in cells so that it cannot do anything, thus making the cell resistant to HIV infection, researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center reported in Nature Immunology. The authors explained that their discovery could pave the way for new therapeutic research at halting or slowing the HIV's progression to AIDS.

Research co-leader, Nathaniel R. Landau, PhD., said:

"A lot of research on viruses, especially HIV, is aimed at trying to understand what the body's mechanisms of resistance are and then to understand how the virus has gotten around these mechanisms."

Landau and team found that dendritic cells containing the SAMHD1 protein are resistant to infection from HIV. They set out to find out why and how SAMHD1 protects such cells. They hoped to find a way of synthetically applying this protection to other cells in the human body.

Dendritic cells (DCs) - these are immune cells. They process antigen material and present it on the surface of other immune system cells.

They believe they now have the answer.

When HIV, or any virus, infects a cell, it takes over that cell's molecular material to replicate - the material being dNTPs (deoxynucleotide triphosphates). dNTPs are DNA building blocks. When the virus replicates, the subsequent DNA molecule has all the virus' genes, which goes on to replicate more virus.

The scientists wondered why the hijacking of replicating material did not occur in dendritic cells which contain SAMHD1. They found that SAMHD1 destroys the pool of dNTPs, literally depriving the virus of any building blocks to make its genetic data - this process is called nucleotide pool depletion.

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