Researchers crack RNA code that could lead to cure for HIV and other viruses

Researchers may have finally cracked the code that governs a major group of viruses that includes the common cold and HIV.

According to a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by a team from the University of Leeds and University of York, this code can be jammed, stopping a virus from assembling itself and thus preventing the disease it causes.

Single strand RNA viruses are both the simplest and the earliest viruses to have evolved, and yet they are still some of the most dangerous.

They include Rhinovirus, or the common cold, which afflicts more people every year than all other infectious agents put together.

HIV, polio, hepatitis C and chikungunya also fall into this category.

Dr Roman Tuma, Reader in Biophysics at the University of Leeds, said in a media statement: "We have understood for decades that the RNA carries the genetic messages that create viral proteins, but we didn't know that, hidden within the stream of letters we use to denote the genetic information, is a second code governing virus assembly. It is like finding a secret message within an ordinary news report and then being able to crack the whole coding system behind it.

"This paper goes further: it also demonstrates that we could design molecules to interfere with the code, making it uninterpretable and effectively stopping the virus in its tracks."

"These experiments confirm that the selective advantages for viral yield and encapsidation specificity, predicted from previous modeling of packaging signal-mediated assembly, are found in Nature. Regions of the genome that act as packaging signals also function in translational and transcriptional enhancement, as well as directly coding for the coat protein, highlighting the density of encoded functions within the viral RNA.

"Assembly and gene expression are therefore direct molecular competitors for different functional folds of the same RNA sequence. The strongest packaging signal in the test fragment, encodes a region of the coat protein that undergoes a conformational change upon contact with packaging signals. A similar phenomenon occurs in other RNA viruses for which packaging signals are known. These contacts hint at an even deeper density of encoded functions in viral RNA, which if confirmed, would have profound consequences for the evolution of this class of pathogens."