TCBG Research on Retroviruses Presented at NIH Meeting

19 June 2015

The research of TCBG postdoctoral fellow Juan Perilla and TCBG physics graduate student Boon Chong Goh (see below) on one of the first structures of an immature retroviral lattice has been presented in a lecture at the meeting "Structural Biology Related to HIV/AIDS - 2015." This annual conference is sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and took place on their campus in Bethesda, MD, from June 18-19, 2015.

It is notable that Boon Chong Goh was the only graduate student to give a talk at the NIH meeting. His poster was selected among many submissions for the honor of a platform talk. His presentation was titled "Computational Modeling of the Immature Retroviral Lattice." The abstract is below.

Obtaining an atomic structure of the immature Gag lattice has been elusive for many years. Recent advances in cryo-electron microscopy have yielded high-resolution density maps and therefore enabled accurate computational modelings and simulations. Computational modeling offers a unique opportunity to investigate the physical and chemical processes that occur during the replication cycle of a virus. In this poster, we present the first atomic model of an immature Gag lattice (1), using Rous Sarcoma Virus as the model system. This model was obtained using microsecond-long molecular dynamics simulations and tested by mutagenesis experiments in vitro. In light of our results, we discuss the recently published electron micrograph of the immature capsid of HIV.
1. BC Goh, JR Perilla, MR England, KJ Heyrana, RC Craven, and K Schulten, Atomic Modeling of an Immature Retroviral Lattice using Molecular Dynamics and Mutagenesis, Structure, (accepted)

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Boon Chong Goh presents his work on an immature retroviral lattice at the NIH Conference "Structural Biology Related to HIV/AIDS - 2015."