Protein that can knock out HIV identified

In a pioneering research, scientists claim to have identified a protein that can knock out HIV, which causes AIDS, by starving it of raw materials it needs to reproduce .

An international team, led by the NYU Langone Medical Center, says its research has in fact revealed a mechanism by which the immune system tries to halt spread of HIV, and harnessing this mechanism may pave the way for therapeutic research aimed at slowing the virus' progression to AIDS.

"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," said team member Nathaniel R Landau in the 'Nature Immunology' journal.

The research focused on a protein called SAMHD1. Recent studies have found that immune cells, called dendritic cells, containing the protein are resistant to infection by HIV. But it was not clear till now how it works to protect these cells.

Now, Landau and his colleagues are able to provide an answer: When a virus, like HIV, infects a cell, it hijacks the cell's molecular material to replicate. That molecular material is in the form of deoxynucleotide triphosphates (dNTPs), which are the building blocks for DNA.

Once the virus replicates, the resulting DNA molecule contains all the genes of the virus and instructs the cell to make more virus. The team found that SAMHD1 protects the cell from viruses by destroying the pool of dNTPs, leaving the virus without any building blocks to make its genetic information.