HIV-1 creates its own lipid bed for assembly

The work of Delphine Muriaux and Cyril Favard about HIV-1 assembly published in Science Advances (IF=12.8).

https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/10/eaaw8651

HIV-1 infects CD4 T cells and produces viral particles (of a hundred of nanometers) that bud from the membrane of the infected cell. The virus thus acquires a lipid envelope that derives from the host cell. Using dynamic nanoscopy (scanning STED-FCS), the team of D. Muriaux and C. Favard at RIM, in collaboration with C. Eggeling and J. Chojnacki of the University of Oxford, has shown that HIV-1 sorts lipids in the plasma membrane and traps specifically PI(4,5)P2 and cholesterol to create a new assembly nano-platform, a real “virus factory”.