Rocaglamide for HIV-1

Journal Club. Paul Rosenfeld and coworkers at the University of Toronto recently reported in the journal Viruses that Rocaglamide, a structurally novel natural product, inhibits HIV-1 replication. They demonstrated that Rocaglamide induces stable binding of eIF4A1 onto the viral RNA genome in a manner that interferes with the ordered assembly of Gag along Gag-gRNA assemblies required to generate infections virions.