Nucleic Acid Sequence Discrimination by the HIV-1 Nucleocapsid Protein NCp7: A Fluorescence Study

The critical functions of the HIV-1 nucleocapsid protein NCp7 in genomic RNA packaging and reverse transcription, essentially rely on interactions with nucleic acids. A significant progress in the knowledge of these interactions has been recently achieved with the NMR-derived structures of NCp7 derivatives in complex with two short sequences of the HIV-1 ψ packaging signal, namely ACGCC and the stem-loop 3 (SL3) motif. To further identify the...