Inhibition of HIV-1 expression and replication by SOFA-HDV ribozymes against Tat and Rev mRNA sequences
Bibliographic record
Abstract
RNA-based compounds are promising methods to inactivate viruses. New specific hepatitis delta virus (HDV)-derived ribozymes are natural molecules that can be engineered to specifically target a viral RNA. We have designed specific on-off adapted (SOFA) HDV-ribozymes targeting the regions of the HIV-1 RNA in the Tat and Rev sequences. We show that these SOFA-HDV ribozymes cleave their Tat RNA target in vitro. They inhibit the Tat-mediated transactivation of HIV-1 long terminal repeat by up to 62 and 86% in luciferase and beta-galactosidase assays, respectively. Inactivation of transfected HIV pNL4-3 molecular clone reached a fourfold inhibition by reverse transcriptase assay of the supernatant and an almost undetectable Gag protein synthesis. In vivo RNA cleavage reached 66 and 86% for two of the tested ribozymes showing that the decrease in HIV production is due to the direct decline in spliced and unspliced viral RNA. These SOFA-HDV-ribozymes were able to target four HIV-1 strains, showing an extended potential to act on multiple HIV variants. When transfected before HIV-1 infection, they prevented incoming virus to be expressed. Our results show that SOFA-HDV-ribozymes show a great potential to target HIV and to be used as therapeutic agents in gene therapy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".