The productive site of HIV-1 assembly is the plasma membrane, both in cultured cell lines and primary cells. This conclusion is based both on the observation that newly synthesized Gag first appears at the plasma membrane, and is only detected later in endosomes, and the demonstration that inhibiting endocytosis blocks the appearance of virions in the internal organelles without affecting the yield of extracellular particles This assembly of HIV-1 at the plasma membrane make the assembly accessible to imaging using total internal reflection fluorescence microscopy (TIR-FM) a technique on which a large fraction of the experiments in this proposal are based. This technique has been used to visualize individual virions of HIV-1 as they assemble as well as the movement and packaging of individual molecules or dimers of HIV-1 genome. The technique has been used to demonstrate that the virions accumulate at the plasma membrane over a period of 6-20 minutes. The genome is recruited to the plasma membrane immediately before recruitment of Gag. In contrast, ESCRTs are recruited for only tens of seconds and tens of molecules transiently at the very end of the recruitment of Gag. The AAA-ATPase, Vps4, is recruited just seconds later. Super-resolution optical microscopy has added the information that ESCRT recruitment is to the neck that links the nascent virion to the mother cell. The long-term goal of this project is to identify, characterize and ultimately understand the steps in the biogenesis of HIV-1 and related retroviruses. We want to understand the dynamics of viral components as they interact with each other and with host components. Imaging based approaches allow the examination of both the dynamics and localization of molecules during which may be inaccessible through biochemical techniques. The main foci will be on the dynamics and localization of the viral protein Gag, the dynamics and localization of host molecules and then the relative dynamics and localization of the viral and host molecules.
Some of the most powerful anti-viral agents interfere with the ability of the viruses to assemble. This project will examine the assembly if single viruses of HIV-1 with the goal of understanding the steps in the assembly of the virus.
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