Drug 9AA reactivates p21Waf1 and Inhibits HIV-1 progeny formation.docVIP

Virology Journal BioMedCentral Research Open Access Drug 9AA reactivates p21/Waf1 and Inhibits HIV-1 progeny formation Weilin Wu1, Kylene Kehn-Hall1, Caitlin Pedati1, Lynnsey Zweier1, Iris Castro1, Zachary Klase1, Cynthia S Dowd2, Larisa Dubrovsky1, Michael Bukrinsky1 and Fatah Kashanchi*1,3,4 Address: 1The George Washington University Medical Center, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Washington, DC 20037, USA, 2The George Washington University, Department of ChemistryWashington, DC 20037, USA, 3The Institute for Genomic Research, Rockville, MD 20850, USA and 4The George Washington University, W.M. Keck Institute for Proteomics Technology and Applications, Washington, DC 20037, USA Email: Weilin Wu - bcmwxw@; Kylene Kehn-Hall - bcmkwk@; Caitlin Pedati - bcmcsp@; Lynnsey Zweier - analaz@; Iris Castro - analaz@; Zachary Klase - bcmzak@; Cynthia S Dowd - cdowd@; Larisa Dubrovsky - mtmsxd@; Michael Bukrinsky - mtmmib@; Fatah Kashanchi* - bcmfxk@ * Corresponding author Published: 18 March 2008 Received: 30 January 2008 Accepted: 18 March 2008 Virology Journal 2008, 5:41 doi:10.1186/1743-422X-5-41 This article is available from: /content/5/1/41 ? 2008 Wu et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract It has been demonstrated that the p53 pathway plays an important role in HIV-1 infection. Previous work from our lab has established a model demonstrating how p53 could become inactivated in HIV-1 infected cells through binding to Tat. Subsequently, p53 was inactivated and lost its ability to transactivate its downstream target gene p21/waf1. P21/waf1 is a well-known cdk inhibitor (CKI) that can lead to cell cycle arrest upon DNA damage. Most recently, the p21/waf1 function was furt