Utilizing Imaging Approaches to Reveal Details of the HIV Lifecycle

HIV is a retrovirus that infects key regulatory cells of the immune system, disrupting normal immune function, leaving infected individuals susceptible to opportunistic infections that lead to death. Luckily today we have drugs that can target enzymatic functions of viral proteins to block viral replication and subsequent pathogenesis. A better understanding of the HIV lifecycle can identify other potential vulnerabilities that can be potential targets of future drugs, because the virus can develop resistance to the current generations of anti-retroviral drugs. A variety of genetic, biochemical, and molecular biology approaches have been utilized to provide important molecular details about the HIV lifecycle, but these approaches only provide minimal kinetic insights and minimal information about how the virus interacts within the cellular environment to infect target cells. The Hope laboratory has utilized cell biology and imaging approaches to gain a better understanding of the kinetics of the different steps for the HIV life cycle and the location that they take place within cells. Fluorescent proteins can be fused to viral and cellular proteins to allow their direct visualization in living and fixed cells. Different imaging approaches such as fluorescence microscopy and electron microscopy can be correlated to provide highest resolution information. And very recently, we have developed methods that allow us to correlate the behavior of individual particles with the ability to infect individual cells. Using this variety of cell biology and imaging approaches have and will continue to make a major contribution to our understanding of the HIV life cycle.