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The morphology of the immature HIV-1 virion
A Ohagen1, R B Luftig, A S Reicin
1Department of Biochemistry, Biomedical Center, Uppsala, Sweden. asa@totem.bm-c.uu.se
Abstract:
Newly released HIV-1 particles exhibit an immature morphology, previously reported to be characterized by a doughnut/ring-shaped structure. In this study we showed that among immature extracellular virus particles not only were particles with doughnut-shaped morphology present, but particles with a crescent morphology were also observed. These particles occurred with different frequencies, depending on whether they were in the cell or in cell-free fractions. The crescent-shaped particles were more abundant in the cell-free fractions, whereas the particles in the cell fraction mainly exhibited doughnut-shaped morphology. The crescent-shaped structure may represent an assembly intermediate.