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Good to CU

Nature volume 424, pages 21–22 (2003)Cite this article

A powerful arm of the cellular defence against microbial invaders has been characterized. APOBEC3G, a protein that can fight off HIV, works by introducing 'typographical errors' during viral replication.

HIV encodes a protein that allows the virus to multiply in otherwise resistant human cells1,2,3. This protein, Vif — for 'viral infectivity factor' — works by overcoming a cellular protein, APOBEC3G, whose task is to inhibit the replication of HIV and other retroviruses4. As they describe in Cell5 and on pages 94 and 99 of this issue6,7, three groups have now discovered how APOBEC3G hampers viral replication. The authors find that, as the retroviral RNA genome is copied into DNA in host cells, this protein changes 'C's to 'U's in the DNA. APOBEC3G therefore represents a remarkable innate cellular defence mechanism that drastically alters the chemical composition and coding capacity of replicating retroviruses.

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Figure 1: Editing HIV: how the cellular APOBEC3G protein might inhibit HIV replication5,6,7,10.

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  1. the Department of Biochemistry, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, 84132, Utah, USA

    Yapeng Gu & Wesley I. Sundquist

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  1. Yapeng Gu
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  2. Wesley I. Sundquist
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Correspondence to Wesley I. Sundquist.

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Gu, Y., Sundquist, W. Good to CU. Nature 424, 21–22 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1038/424021a

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