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Publication Abstract from PubMed

Replication of the hepatitis C viral genome is accomplished by the NS5B RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp), for which mechanistic understanding and structure-guided drug design efforts have been hampered by its propensity to crystallize in a closed, polymerization incompetent state. Removal of an autoinhibitory beta-hairpin loop from genotype 2a HCV NS5B increases de novo RNA synthesis by >100-fold, promotes RNA binding, and facilitated determination of the first crystallographic structures of HCV polymerase in complex with RNA primer-template pairs. These crystal structures demonstrate the structural realignment required for primer-template recognition and elongation, provide new insights into HCV RNA synthesis at the molecular level, and may prove useful in the structure-based design of novel antiviral compounds. Additionally, our approach for obtaining the RNA primer-template-bound structure of HCV polymerase may be generally applicable to solving RNA-bound complexes for other viral RdRps that contain similar regulatory beta-hairpin loops including bovine viral diarrhea virus, dengue virus, and West Nile virus.

Structure of HCV Polymerase in Complex with Primer-Template RNA.,Mosley RT, Edwards TE, Murakami E, Lam AM, Grice RL, Du J, Sofia MJ, Furman PA, Otto MJ J Virol. 2012 Apr 11. PMID:22496223^[1]

From MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.