Nucleic Acids Research Advance Access originally published online on August 5, 2009
Nucleic Acids Research 2009 37(18):6194-6204; doi:10.1093/nar/gkp644
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Nucleic Acids Research, 2009, Vol. 37, No. 18 6194-6204
© 2009 The Author(s). Published by Oxford University Press.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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RNAi-mediated inhibition of HIV-1 by targeting partially complementary viral sequences
Laboratory of Experimental Virology, Department of Medical Microbiology, Center for Infection and Immunity Amsterdam (CINIMA), Academic Medical Center, University of Amsterdam, Meibergdreef 15, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
*To whom correspondence should be addressed. Tel: +31 20 566 4822; Fax: +31 20 691 6531; Email: b.berkhout{at}amc.uva.nl
Received April 18, 2009. Revised July 17, 2009. Accepted July 19, 2009.
Potent antiviral RNAi can be induced by intracellular expression of short hairpin RNAs (shRNAs) and artificial microRNAs (miRNAs). Expression of shRNA and miRNA results in target mRNA degradation (perfect base pairing) or translational repression (partial base pairing). Although efficient inhibition can be obtained, error-prone viruses such as human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) can escape from RNAi-mediated inhibition by mutating the target sequence. Recently, artificial miRNAs have been shown to be potent RNAi inducers due to their efficient processing by the RNAi machinery. Furthermore, miRNAs may be more proficient in suppressing imperfect targets than shRNAs. In this study, we tested the knockdown efficiency of miRNAs and shRNAs against wild-type and RNAi-escape HIV-1 variants with one or two mutations in the target sequence. ShRNAs and miRNAs can significantly inhibit the production of HIV-1 variants with mutated target sequences in the open reading frame. More pronounced mutation-tolerance was measured for targets in the 3' untranslated region (3' UTR). Partially complementary sequences within the 3' UTR of the HIV-1 RNA genome efficiently act as target sites for miRNAs and shRNAs. These data suggest that targeting imperfect target sites by antiviral miRNAs or shRNAs provides an alternative RNAi approach for inhibition of pathogenic viruses.