Hongjun Bai, Eric Lewitus, Yifan Li, Paul V Thomas, Michelle Zemil, Mélanie Merbah, Caroline E Peterson, Thujitha Thuraisamy, Phyllis A Rees, Agnes Hajduczki, Vincent Dussupt, Bonnie Slike, Letzibeth Mendez-Rivera, Annika Schmid, Erin Kavusak, Mekhala Rao, Gabriel Smith, Jessica Frey, Alicea Sims, Lindsay Wieczorek, Victoria Polonis, Shelly J Krebs, Julie A Ake, Sandhya Vasan, Diane L Bolton, M Gordon Joyce, Samantha Townsley, Morgane Rolland
An effective HIV-1 vaccine must elicit broadly neutralizing antibodies (bnAbs) against highly diverse Envelope glycoproteins (Env). Since Env with the longest hypervariable (HV) loops is more resistant to the cognate bnAbs than Env with shorter HV loops, we redesigned hypervariable loops for updated Env consensus sequences of subtypes B and C and CRF01_AE. Using modeling with AlphaFold2, we reduced the length of V1, V2, and V5 HV loops while maintaining the integrity of the Env structure and glycan shield, and modified the V4 HV loop...
May 9, 2024: Nature Communications