HIV-1 Gag p55

Applications: It is most suitable to be used as substrate for the HIV-1 protease activity assay.

It can be used in detection of anti-HIV-1 Gag antibody in Western blotting or ELISA. All the anti-HIV-1 Gag antibodies such as anti-p17 antibody, anti-p24 antibody and anti-p15 antibody can be measured at the same time.HIV-1 Gag p55 is a precursor protein of several proteins that Form the core structure of AIDS virus, indispensable to its reproduction. This protein is digested by HIV-1 protease, first into intermediate products p41 and p15. Thenp41 is digested into matrix protein p17 and capsid protein p24. Protein p15 is further digested into nucleocapsid protein p7 and to p6 and p1 both of unknown function (1). The product is over-expressed as a recombinant protein in E. coli with a plasmid carrying the Gag p55 coding region of HIV-1 virus, subtype B (2), and highly purified by several steps of chromatography (3). Its molecular weight is 55 kD, same as that of p55 purified from AIDS virus particles (Fig 1). The protein bands at lowerpositions are degradation products of p55 which could not be separated during purification steps.