Researchers who are either developing drug treatments for AIDS or studying the virus that causes the disease have a new resource—an online database of AIDS-related protein structures just unveiled for public use by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).Developed in collaboration with the National Cancer Institute, the HIV Structural Reference Database (http://xpdb.nist.gov/hivsdb/hivsdb.html) will receive, annotate, archive and distribute structural data for proteins involved in making HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, as well as molecules that inhibit these activities. Until now, much of this information was not widely available because it was unpublished. The new database contains data from both the published literature and from direct contributions by industrial and other laboratories.The database will be especially useful in developing strategies for inhibiting the activities of the HIV protease (see image) that is essential for maturation of HIV. In addition, the database is expected to help scientists understand and circumvent the problem of mutations that make HIV resistant to certain drugs.
