Northwestern Medicine scientists have developed a novel method of tracking HIV infection, allowing the behavior of individual virions — infectious particles — to be connected to infectivity.
The findings could help lead to the development of novel therapies for HIV prevention and treatment by providing a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of HIV’s lifecycle.
The paper was published August 7 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
It has become routine to visualize the movement and progression of individual virions in cells, but the relevance of these observations was previously unclear, as many virions are defective or do not progress to make further copies of themselves.
