[Harnessing retroviral engineering for genome reprogramming]

The accumulated knowledge on the biology of the HIV-1 virus has led to the emergence of technologies that exploit the architecture of retroviruses and their integration or vectorization properties. This field of study constitutes retroviral vectorology, democratized in laboratories by the use of lentiviral vectors. By hijacking retroviral assembly, other systems are emerging and are increasingly mentioned in recent literature. In particular, defective retroviral particles are capable of transiently delivering effectors that act on the genome: they thus appear to be more suitable tools for delivering genetic scalpels, whose persistence in the target cell or organism is not required. Since the description of the CRISPR Cas9 system in 2012, genome engineering techniques have continued to evolve in terms of capacity and reliability. Several derivatives of the CRISPR system can now modify the human genome with nucleotide-level precision. Introducing these effectors into the cell or organism remains a major technical challenge that vector scientists are striving to overcome. This review describes the major retroviral systems used for genome manipulation. Following an overview of genetic engineering techniques, we will see how researchers have developed a wide range of genomic tools by manipulating different processes in the retroviral architecture.