Improved tissue culture technique for production of poorly replicating human immunodeficiency virus strains

We present an improved culture technique for propagation of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) strains that grow slowly, yield low reverse transcriptase activity and can be transmitted poorly, if at all, to cell lines. By using the Jurkat-tatIII cell line 29 (of 30) of these slow/low HIV strains, including one West African strain, could be shown to replicate over a period of several weeks.