Since its emergence in sub-Saharan Africa, this lethal disease has spread with eerie effectiveness throughout the civilized world. Without these Helper T cells and inducer T cells the immune system is unable to mount a response against any foreign antigen. AIDS patients have compromised immune systems and therefore fall victim to opportunistic diseases, e.g., cancers and pneumonia, AIDS does not kill. Therefore when a retrovirus enters a cell, a viral enzyme, reverse transcriptase, transcribes viral RNA into duplex DNA, which the cell's machinery then replicates and transcribes as if it were its own. The HIV genome contains three main genes, gag , pol , and env .
Proteases cleave their protein products to yield the envelope, capsid, and replication proteins.
Six additional genes, unique to HIV, regulate expression of the HIV genome. Reverse transcriptase is an enzyme found retroviruses and some bacteria, and due to its essential role in HIV infection, its structure, function, and mechanism have become of increasing interest. By inhibiting this enzyme, HIV would be unable to integrate its genome into the genome of the host cell, and therefore rendering the virus harmless. Escherichia coli RNA polymerase RNA polymerase is an enzyme essential to all life forms, this enzyme is responsible for transcribing RNA from the DNA template. Escherichia coli Transcription occurs in three distinct phases-initiation, elongation, and termination.