Single molecule biochemistry using optical tweezers.

The use of optical trapping to create extremely compliant mechanical probes has ushered in a new field of biological inquiry, the mechanical and kinetic study of proteins at the single molecule level. This review focuses on three examples of such study and includes methods of extracting parameters of interest from the raw data such experiments generate.

Plus-strand origin for human immunodeficiency virus type 1: implications for integration.

The start site for human immunodeficiency virus type 1 plus strands within the polypurine tract was mapped by an in vitro analysis to the sequence 5'-ACTG....From this result, it can be inferred that integration of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 must be accompanied by the loss of two base pairs from the polypurine tract-primed long terminal repeat end.

Incomplete removal of the RNA primer for minus-strand DNA synthesis by human immunodeficiency virus type 1 reverse transcriptase.

A synthetic RNA oligonucleotide (15-mer) corresponding to the 3' end of the lysine tRNA primer was hybridized to single-stranded DNA containing the human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) primer-binding site and extended with a DNA polymerase. The resulting structures were used to study primer removal by the RNase H activity of HIV-1 reverse transcriptase. The initial cleavage event removes the RNA primer as a 14-mer and leaves a single ribonucleotide A residue bound to the 5' end of the DNA strand. This result explains the observation by several groups that HIV-1 circle junctions contain 4 bp that are not present in the integrated provirus instead of the predicted 3 bp. Subsequent cleavage events occur at other sites internal to the RNA molecule, and the ribonucleotide A residue on the end of the DNA strand is ultimately removed. Therefore, the biologically relevant cleavage that produces the 14-mer reflects the kinetics of the reaction as well as a specificity for nucleic acid sequence. When the RNA oligonucleotide alone was hybridized to the primer-binding site and tested as a substrate for HIV-1 RNase H, the cleavage pattern near the 3' end of the RNA was altered.

The sequence features important for plus strand priming by human immunodeficiency virus type 1 reverse transcriptase.

A specific cleavage by the reverse transcriptase-associated RNase H activity generates the RNA primer for plus strand DNA synthesis during reverse transcription. Previously, we used site-directed mutagenesis to define the sequence features of the polypurine tract (PPT) required for correct plus strand priming by the Moloney murine leukemia virus (M-MuLV) reverse transcriptase (Rattray, A. J., and Champoux, J. J. (1989) J. Mol. Biol. 208, 445-456). Although the sequences of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) and M-MuLV diverge completely outside a 20-base region encompassing the PPT, within this region there are only three differences between the two viruses. Here we show that the HIV-1 reverse transcriptase will utilize the M-MuLV PPT as an origin for plus strand initiation in vitro. This finding enabled us to use the set of PPT mutants previously generated in M-MuLV, in conjunction with a small set of newly derived mutations within the HIV-1 PPT, to study plus strand priming by the HIV-1 reverse transcriptase. Despite the similarity between the two PPT regions, the sequence features important for positioning RNase H for the cleavage reaction that generates the plus strand primer are different for the two viruses. For M-MuLV, the -7A residue is a critical specificity determinant in the priming reaction, whereas for HIV-1, the -2G and -4G residues play key roles in determining the specificity of priming.