STRIKING SIMILARITIES BETWEEN HIV-1 ENV PROTEIN AND THE APOPTOSIS MEDIATING CELL-SURFACE ANTIGEN FAS - ROLE IN THE PATHOGENESIS OF AIDS

We have designed a computer strategy in order to detect systematically peptidic sites with the potential of interfering with the immune regu latory processes. Applying this software to HIV-1 proteins has led us to unravel a few peptidic sites which could either act directly or be the targets of an auto-immune reaction during HIV-1 infection. We prev iously reported that the SLWDQ pentapeptide identity with a critical s ite of CD4 could trigger in HIV-1 infected individuals both an humoral and a cellular autoimmune reaction. In this study, we focused on surp rising similitudes unravelled by our software Automat, between HIV-1/2 and another immunoregulatory molecule, the Fas protein which is also called the apoptosis-mediating cell-surface antigen.