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Updated: Sep 28, 2026

Isolation of Translating Ribosomes Containing Peptidyl-tRNAs for Functional and Structural Analyses
Published on: February 25, 2011
Retrovirus-specific packaging of aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases with cognate primer tRNAs
Shan Cen1, Hassan Javanbakht, Sunghoon Kim
1Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research and McGill AIDS Center, Jewish General Hospital, McGill University, 3755 Cote Ste-Catherine Road, Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3T 1E2.
Abstract:
The tRNAs used to prime reverse transcription in human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1), Rous sarcoma virus (RSV), and Moloney murine leukemia virus (Mo-MuLV) are, tRNA(Trp), and tRNA(Pro), respectively. Using antibodies to the three cognate human aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases, we found that only lysyl-tRNA synthetase (LysRS) is present in HIV-1, only tryptophanyl-tRNA synthetase (TrpRS) is present in RSV, and neither these two synthetases nor prolyl-tRNA synthetase (ProRS) is present in Mo-MuLV. LysRS and TrpRS are present in HIV-1 and RSV at approximately 25 and 12 molecules/virion, respectively. These results support the hypothesis that, in HIV-1 and RSV, the cognate aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase may be used as the signal for targeting the selective packaging of primer tRNAs into retroviruses. The absence of ProRS in Mo-MuLV is consistent with reports that selective packaging of tRNA(Pro) in this virus is less important for achieving optimum annealing of the primer to Mo-MuLV genomic RNA.
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