What metabolic pathway is the enzyme reverse transcriptase involved in?
Your use of ‘metabolic pathway’ is not really the best way to describe reverse transcription. The first answerer is 100% correct but this is not really a metabolic pathway like glycolysis, rather it is an enzyme strategy utilized by viruses to encode themselves in the host DNA. The HIV virus does this very well. That is why doctors use drugs that inhibit the reverse transcriptase enzyme to treat AIDS. The effect of these drugs are very specific- retroviral inhibition. There is no known pathway in which reverse transcriptase is used normally in the human body, so far, only viruses do this. So, the drugs are great in that they only target the virus and minimize the side effects in the host.
