Site-specific recombination technologies are powerful new tools for the manipulation of genomic DNA in insects that can improve transgenesis strategies such as targeting transgene insertions, allowing transgene cassette exchange and DNA mobilization for transgene stabilization. However, understanding the fitness cost implications of these manipulations for transgenic strain applications is crit...

A major obstacle in applying gene therapy to clinical practice is the lack of efficient and safe gene delivery techniques. Viral delivery has encountered a number of serious problems including immunological reactions and malignancy. Non-viral delivery methods (liposomes, sonoporation and electroporation) have either low efficiency invivo or produce severe collateral damage to ocular tissues. We...

background: improving the performance of hiv diagnosis assays is one of the most important ways to reduce hiv transmission. because of the high mutation rate of hiv, it is critical to use the conserved proteins to develop diagnostic immunoassay methods. because integrase is one of the most conserved proteins of hiv, it may be a good target for this purpose. in this paper cloning, purification a...

background drug design against human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (hiv-1) integrase through its mechanistic study is of great interest in the area in biological research. the main obstacle in this area is the absence of the full-length crystal structure for hiv-1 integrase to be used as a model. a complete structure, similar to hiv-1 of a prototype foamy virus integrase in complex with dna, in...

Previous reports have suggested that the repressor gene, c, of phiC31 is autoregulated and that likely operators are conserved inverted repeat sequences (CIRs1&2) located just upstream of the promoters, cp1 and cp2. Evidence is now presented that the CIRs 1&2 are indeed binding sites for one of the three inframe, N-terminally different protein isoforms of 42, 54 and 74 kDa produced by the c gen...

Some new diazo incorporated coumarin compounds were designed and synthesized to evaluate their anti-HIV activity. Overall, compounds were active against HIV at 100 μM. Additionally, no cytotoxic effect was observed at this concentration. The compound with 4-chlorobenzyl group indicated the best anti-HIV activity (52%). Docking studies using the later crystallographic data available for PFV inte...

Understanding the HIV integrase protein and mechanisms of resistance to HIV integrase inhibitors is complicated by the lack of a full length HIV integrase crystal structure. Moreover, a lentiviral integrase structure with co-crystallised DNA has not been described. For these reasons, we have developed a structural method that utilizes free software to create quaternary HIV integrase homology mo...

The virally encoded integrase protein carries out retroviral integration, which requires specific interactions with the two ends of the viral DNA, and also with host DNA that is the target of integration. We attached a photo-cross-linking agent to specific viral and target DNA sites to identify regions of the integrase polypeptide that are in close proximity to those substrate features in the a...