Credit: Courtesy of The Scripps Research Institute.
The HIV envelope protein has long been considered one of the most difficult targets in structural biology and of great value for medical science—particularly for HIV/AIDS vaccine development. Using advanced techniques in both cryo-EM and x-ray crystallography, researchers from The Scripps Research Institute and Weill Medical College of Cornell University have now determined the structure of this protein, shown here bound by broadly neutralizing antibodies against two distinct sites of vulnerability.