Evaluation and prediction of the HIV-1 central polypurine tract influence on foamy viral vectors to transduce dividing and growth-arrested cells.

ABSTRACT: Retroviral vectors are potent tools for gene delivery and various biomedical applications. To accomplish a gene transfer task successfully, retroviral vectors must effectively transduce diverse cell cultures at different phases of a cell cycle. However, very promising retroviral vectors based on the foamy viral (FV) backbone lack the capacity to efficiently transduce quiescent cells. It is hypothesized that this phenomenon might be explained as the inability of foamy viruses to form a pre-integration complex (PIC) with nuclear import activity in growth-arrested cells, which is the characteristic for lentiviruses (HIV-1). In this process, the HIV-1 central polypurine tract (cPPT) serves as a primer for plus-strand synthesis to produce a "flap" element and is believed to be crucial for the s

SUBMITTER: Shityakov S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4070436 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature