Massive Simulation of the HIV ‘Shell’ Reveals New Vulnerabilities that We Might Exploit to Eliminate the Virus

It took two years, two supercomputers and two Illinois researchers, Juan Perilla and the late Klaus Schulten, to simulate 1.2 microseconds in the life of an HIV capsid, a protein cage that protects the viral genome. The findings, reported in the journal “Nature Communications,” indicate several properties that enhance the capsid’s adeptness at finding a path to the nucleus of target cells, but also potential vulnerabilities that could be exploited to defeat the HIV virus.

Illinois News Bureau