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Rev Interacts With Tubulin Heterodimers To Cause Cell Cycle Defects, Poornima Kotha Lakshmi Narayan

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Rev is a regulatory protein that plays an important role in the replication of HIV virus by post-transcriptionally promoting expression of viral proteins late in infection. Rev expression also slows cell growth, leads to an accumulation of cells in G2/M specifically before the spindle checkpoint, and can produce changes in ploidy. Because Rev is capable of depolymerizing microtubules (MTs) in vitro, possibly by a mechanism shared with Kinesin-13 proteins, themselves potent cellular MT depolymerases, I tested the hypothesis that these cellular defects were due to an interaction between Rev and tubulin.

To this end, Rev and select Rev mutants defective …