Insertions and deletions in HIV-1 reverse transcriptase: consequences for drug resistance and viral fitness

Human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) reverse transcriptase (RT) is an important target of drugs fighting HIV infection. The introduction of potent antiretroviral therapies based on the use of RT inhibitors and/or protease inhibitors has been an important achievement towards the control of AIDS. However, the development of drug resistance constitutes a major hurdle towards long-term efficacy of those therapies. With the increasing complexity of the antiretroviral regimens, novel mutational patterns conferring high-level resistance to nucleoside and nonnucleoside RT inhibitors have been identified in viral isolates. Among them, insertions and deletions in the beta3-beta4 hairpin-loop-coding region of HIV-1 RT have been identified in heavily-treated patients. Insertions of one, two or several residues appear to have a significant impact on nucleoside analogue resistance. The frequently found combination of a dipeptide insertion and thymidine analogue resistance mutations (i.e. T215Y) in the viral RT confers an ATP-dependent phosphorolytic activity that facilitates the removal of the inhibitor from primers terminated with zidovudine or stavudine. Furthermore, this mechanism appears to be relevant for resistance mediated by one amino acid-deletions appearing in combination with thymidine analogue resistance mutations. However, in other sequence contexts (i.e. in the presence of Q151M), the effects of the deletion are not fully understood. Drugs targeting the excision repair mechanism could be an important aid in the fight against multinucleoside-resistant HIV isolates bearing complex mutational patterns in their RT-coding region.