The regulation of retrotransposition/retrovirus integration has continued to be the primary focus of this laboratory. By using a genome packaging deficient retrovirus developed in this laboratory we have demonstrated that the provirus integration block due to Fv-1 restriction can be abrogated by genome deficient virions. This observation suggests that virus capsid target molecules specifically interact with the Fv-1 gene product and titrates out this activity, allowing additional virus to infect and integrate without restriction. This finding excludes the published model which involves a requirement for the viral RNA genome in abrogation. Future work will be focused on the identification of the Fv-1 gene product and the nature of its interaction with the virion target.
