Harvard researchers announced yesterday that they have found a new gene of the AIDS virus which plays a vital role in virus reproduction and may provide new targets for developing a drug to fight the deadly disease.

AIDS viruses which don't have the art-gene, as the new gene is called, cannot reproduce or infect other cells. Therefore, if doctors can find drugs which interfere with the workings of the art-gene, they may be able to control or cure the disease, said Associate Professor of Pathology William Haseltine, who led the research team.

The art-gene may also prove useful in diagnosing the stages of AIDS--a disease which has killed more than 11,300 Americans. Diagnostic tests screen the blood for antibodies to different parts of a virus and predict the progress of a disease. The art-gene produces a viral protein which researchers may be able to use in these sorts of tests.

The discovery of the art-gene, published in yesterday's edition of the scientific journal Nature, demonstrates that the AIDS virus controls its reproduction by a mechanism which doctors have never seen before, Haseltine said.

The AIDS virus, which has been found to reproduce thousands of times faster than normal viruses, indicating its deadly nature, has a strange, built-in delay mechanism.

Because of this mechanism, which has only been theorized, the virus reproduces only some of its parts until the art-gene activates, allowing the full virus to reproduce.

The identification of the art-gene is important because it sheds new light on how the virus controls its reproduction. It is also significant because it opens the possibility of developing a drug which would inhibit the workings of the art-gene, and, by extension, prevent the AIDS virus from reproducing.

"A mechanism like that attributed to the art-gene has not been described before," Haseltine said. In fact, the researchers, who all work at the Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, had to invent a whole new terminology for it. The name art-gene is actually short for Anti-Repression of Translation gene.

National researchers contacted yesterday for comment on Haseltine's discovery said they were not ready to discuss the paper at that time.