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SummaryHIV-1 Tat is a key viral protein that stimulates several steps of viral gene expression. Tat is especially required for the transcription of viral genes but it is still not clear if and how Tat is incorporated into HIV-1 virions. Cyclophilin A (CypA) is a prolylisomerase that binds to HIV-1 capsid protein (CA) and is thereby encapsidated. Here we found that a Tat-CypA-CA tripartite complex assembles in HIV-1 infected cells. Biochemical and biophysical studies showed that high affinity interactions drive the assembly of this complex. Virions devoid of encapsidated Tat showed a 5-10 fold decrease in HIV-infectivity and, conversely, encapsidating Tat into ΔTat viruses greatly enhanced infectivity. The absence of encapsidated Tat decreases the efficiency of retrotranscription by ∼50% and transcription by 99%. We thus identified a Tat-CypA-CA complex that enables Tat encapsidation and showed that encapsidated Tat is required to initiate robust HIV-1 infection and viral production.

The recent discovery of magnetic van der Waals (vdW) materials triggered a wealth of investigations in materials science and now offers genuinely new prospects for both fundamental and applied research. Although the catalog of vdW ferromagnets is rapidly expanding, most of them have a Curie temperature below 300 K, a notable disadvantage for potential applications. Combining element-selective X-ray magnetic imaging and magnetic force microscopy, we resolve at room temperature the magnetic domains and domain walls in micron-sized flakes of the CrTe

In this paper, we show experimentally that for van der Waals heterostructures (vdWh) of atomically-thin materials, the hybridization of bands of adjacent layers is possible only for ultra-clean interfaces. This we achieve through a detailed experimental study of the effect of interfacial separation and adsorbate content on the photoluminescence emission and Raman spectra of ultra-thin vdWh. For vdWh with atomically-clean interfaces, we find the emergence of novel vibrational Raman-active modes whose optical signatures differ significantly from that of the constituent layers. Additionally, we find for such systems a significant modification of the photoluminescence emission spectra with the appearance of peaks whose strength and intensity directly correlate with the inter-layer coupling strength. Our ability to control the intensity of the photoluminescence emission led to the observation of detailed optical features like indirect-band peaks. Our study establishes that it is possible to engineer atomically-thin van der Waals heterostructures with desired optical properties by controlling the inter-layer spacing, and consequently the inter-layer coupling between the constituent layers.

Due to excellent electrical, mechanical, optical properties of graphene owing to its unique band structure and two dimensionality, there is rush to make graphene based devices. Here we propose and prepare a very simple still yet unexplored kind of macroscopic size device which is made by placing two graphene ribbons (few mm2) perpendicular to each other. We show that the intersection of the two ribbons, gives very high mobility as compared to standard single ribbons and also coupling between these two ribbons is confirmed by Raman spectroscopy. In the second part we propose to fabricate a graphene hybrid system by placing molecules which are optically active or eclectically active in between the intersection of the two layers. The characterization of such functionalization is described in this part. &nbsp