The mechanism of integrase is generally accepted to be dependant on the presence of two divalent metal ions in the active site. However, the only available crystal structures of HIV-1 integrase contain either one or no metal ions, hampering structure-based design studies of integrase inhibitors. For this reason, a two-metal ion model of integrase was constructed. This model was used for computa...

Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) is a life-threatening disease which is a collection of symptoms and infections caused by a retrovirus, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). There is currently no curative treatment and therapy is reliant on the use of existing anti-retroviral drugs. Pharmacoinformatics approaches have already proven their pivotal role in the pharmaceutical industry for l...

Recombination by site-specific recombinases is a highly concerted process that requires synapsis of the correct pair of DNA substrates. Phage-encoded serine-integrases are unusual among the serine-recombinase family, which includes transposon resolvases and DNA invertases, in that they utilize two simple but different DNA substrates (attB and attP) and do not require accessory sites, additional...

Retrotransposon Ty1 faces a formidable cell barrier during transposition--the yeast nuclear membrane which remains intact throughout the cell cycle. We investigated the mechanism by which transposition intermediates are transported from the cytoplasm (the presumed site of Ty1 DNA synthesis) to the nucleus, where they are integrated into the genome. Ty1 integrase has a nuclear localization signa...

The conditional expression of hairpin constructs in Drosophila melanogaster has emerged in recent years as a method of choice in functional genomic studies. To date, upstream activating site– driven RNA interference constructs have been inserted into the genome randomly using P-element–mediated transformation, which can result in false negatives due to variable expression. To avoid this problem...

Integrase is an essential enzyme in the life cycle of Human immunoficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) and also an important target for designing integrase inhibitors. In this paper, the binding modes between the wild type integrase core domain (ICD) and the W131A mutant ICD with the benzoic acid derivative--D77 were investigated using the molecular docking combined with molecular dynamics (MD) simula...

Oligonucleotides that can form a highly stable intramolecular four-stranded DNA structure containing two stacked guanosine-quartets (G-quartets) have been reported to inhibit the replication of the human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) in cell culture. Two possible mechanisms for the observed antiviral activity have been proposed: interference with virus adsorption to the cell and/or inhi...

BACKGROUND Achieving long-term gene expression in kidney will be beneficial for gene therapy of renal and congenital diseases, genetic studies constructing animal disease models, and the functional analysis of disease-related genes. PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to develop an in vivo long-term gene expression system in murine kidney using φC31 integrase. METHODS Gene expression in c...

An unusual type of gene expression from an integrase promoter was found in cultures of the bacterium Pseudomonas sp. strain B13. The promoter controls expression of the intB13 integrase gene, which is present near the right end of a 105-kb conjugative genomic island (the clc element) encoding catabolism of aromatic compounds. The enzymatic activity of integrase IntB13 is essential for site-spec...