[Establishment and application of a screening anti-HIV-1 drug model targeted nuclear trafficking of virus RNA]

Abstract

The HIV-1 Rev protein facilitates nuclear export of unspliced and singly spliced viral transcripts containing RRE RNA through the CRM1 export pathway. Inhibition of Rev-mediated RNA nuclear export can arrest HIV-1 transcriptional process, which clearly, reveals a target for anti-HIV drug development. In this work, a cell-based assay has been established for screening anti-HIV compounds targeting the Rev-mediated RNA nuclear export. This assay utilized a codon-optimized green fluorescent protein (GFP) as reporter gene, which expression is in a Rev-dependent manner. Any compound that inhibits the Rev-mediated RNA nuclear export is identified by reducing emission of GFP. The Z' score of this model is 0.8220. Three thousands compounds were screened and the positive rate was 9.3% with a cutoff at 50% inhibition. IMB7C7, one of the positive compounds, efficiently inhibits viral production from HIV-1 infected cells.