HIV Infection of Non-Dividing Cells

HIV infection of non-dividing cells: HIV differs from many other retroviruses in its ability to infect non-dividing cells such as terminally differentiated macrophages. In fact, this property is not particular to macrophages, but is generally true that HIV can infect cells independent of cell-cycle progression.  See review.

For many years, it was thought that the major determinants for this property were signal of viral proteins that targeted a viral complex into the nucleus.  However, we now believe that structural protein called Capsid is the dominant factor for the ability of a retrovirus to infect a non-dividing cell. See papers here and here.

We are now trying to understand the molecular basis for how Capsid mediates the infection of non-dividing cells, and we would like to identify host cell proteins that are important in this process.

HIV infection of non-dividing cells. The brown stained cells are HIV-infected microglial cells from a brain section.