Figure 1

Functional characterization of HTLV-1 mutated XRE sequence. (A) Schematic representation of the HTLV-1 XRE. On the left, the XRE corresponds to U3 and R sequences within the HTLV-1 long terminal repeat, and consists of four stem-loops. On the right, the predicted secondary structure of the stem-loopD (SLD) with the minimal Rex binding site and the mutations introduced within the putative hnRNP A1 binding site are indicated. (B) Schematic view of the reporter plasmid CMV/XRE. (C) Effect of mutations within the XRE sequence on the Rex trans-activation capacity. Jurkat cells were transfected with 1 μg of the indicated reporter plasmid in the presence or not of Rex expression plasmid (200 ng) and the constitutive internal control tk-renilla luciferase vector (10 ng). Data are expressed as normalized luciferase activity and the error bars represent the standard deviations from three independent experiments.