People ask me what my research is on and, though nice of them, most people don't really understand. Anyway I thought it would be cool to put up an image of the protein that I am currently working on. Though, in all honesty, my current project could be on any other protein, but I think i's particularly cool that my supervisors have selected the one above. I got the image using JMOL and obtained the crystal structure and coordinates from the PDB.
So...that's HIV-1 Reverse Transcriptase. (HIV-1 RT)
It reverse transcribes viral RNA into DNA during replication. This (viral) DNA is then plugged into host DNA and when proteins are made from that DNA, the virus propogates...
Blocking the action of HIV-1 RT canblock the spread of the virus
So yeah - A pretty picture of a deadly enzyme.
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