Can you inhibit reverse transcriptase?

Question

without effecting other enzymes & such? If so why are a rev-trans inhibitors not used in RNA virus attacks?

Answer 1

They are so variable, you can attack them for a very limmited amount of time, since it is one of the molecules with the greatest amount of variability and rate of mutation.

Answer 2

Yes. Zidovudine (AZT) and other nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors inhibit reverse transcriptase fairly specifically (they have mild inhibitory actions on mammalian DNA polymerases).

Non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors directly bind to HIV-1 reverse transcriptase and are also fairly specific (nevirapine for example doesn't bind at all to HIV-2 reverse transcriptase).

They don't work on RNA viruses other than retroviruses (such as HIV-1, HIV-2, HTLV-1) because RNA viruses don't transcribe RNA to DNA and so don't have reverse transcriptase.

Hope that helps.