Novel anti-HIV peptides containing multiple copies of artificially designed heptad repeat motifs
- Shi, Weiguo
- Qi, Zhi
- Pan, Chungen
- Xue, Na
- Debnath, Asim K.
- Qie, Jiankun
- Jiang, Shibo
- Liu, Keliang
DOIAbstract
The peptidic anti-HIV drug T20 (Fuzeon) and its analog C34 share a common heptad repeat (HR) sequence, but they have different functional domains, i.e., pocket- and lipid-binding domains (PBD and LBD, respectively). We hypothesize that novel anti-HIV peptides may be designed by using artificial sequences containing multiple copies of HR motifs plus zero, one OF two functional domains. Surprisingly, we found that the peptides containing only the non-natural HR sequences could significantly inhibit HIV-1 infection, while addition of PBD and/or LBD to the peptides resulted in significant improvement of anti-HIV-1 activity. These results suggest that these artificial HR sequences, which may serve as structural domains, could be used as template...
Add to ORKG