WIKIMEDIA, J ROBERT TRUJILLOScientists have inched closer to the goal of understanding the structure of the HIV trimer, an envelope glycoprotein that the virus uses to establish contact with the human cells it will infect, according to new research published last week. The new findings clash with previously published results, prompting calls for the earlier paper to be retracted.
Three late-October papers—one published in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology by researchers at the National Cancer Institute and two Science papers written by a collaborative group from The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, and Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City—arrive at similar structures for the elusive protein, which could be a valuable vaccine target. This latest understanding of the protein, which holds that a spike-like structure is surrounded by three helices that help swivel the spike into position to hook on to a target human cell, contravene a previous model that posited the presence of a cavity at the center of the spike. According to some structural biologists, that earlier work—published in a May 2013 issue of PNAS by Youdong Mao ...
