Theory of HIV-1 RNA genome selection.

Abstract

It is not understood how the HIV-1 retrovirus selects it genomic RNA (gRNA) for packaging into virions from among the multitude of cellular RNA molecules in the cytoplasm of infected cells. Under in-vitro conditions, the Gag proteins of HIV-1 have only a very weak specific binding affinity for the RNA Ψ sequence, which has been shown to be the key recognition label of genomic RNA. In addition, the cellular gRNA concentration is very low yet HIV packages gRNA with high fidelity. We present a numerical model for kinetic HIV-1 gRNA selection that is based on fusion of precursor buds followed by gRNA dimerization.