Overview of the HIV-1 Lentiviral Vector System

Replication-defective oncoretroviral vectors have been the most widely used vehicles for gene-transfer studies because of their capacity to efficiently introduce and stably express transgenes in mammalian cells. A limitation of oncoretroviral vectors is that cell division is required for proviral integration into the host genome. By comparison, lentiviruses such as human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) have evolved a nuclear-import machinery that allows them to infect nondividing as well as dividing cells. This unique property has led to the development of lentiviral vectors for gene delivery to a variety of nondividing or slowly dividing cells including neurons and glial cells of the central nervous system and others. This unit is intended to provide an overview of HIV-1 molecular biology and an introduction to successive generations of HIV-1-based lentiviral vectors.