The HIV-1 leader RNA is exquisitely sensitive to structural changes.

The untranslated leader of the HIV-1 RNA genome is highly structured and contains multiple replication signals. We probed in detail the sequence requirements of a small single-stranded domain using a combination of in silico, in vitro and in vivo virus experiments. Although ‘structure-neutral’ mutations can be designed by RNA prediction algorithms, experimental follow-up studies nearly always demonstrate local or regional RNA structure changes. Our results indicate that the wild-type HIV-1 RNA sequence has been selected from total sequence space as a unique solution to present critical replication signals in the context of a complex leader structure with small intervening single-stranded segments.