Retroviruses

Excerpt

Fifteen years ago, the drive to study retroviruses was rooted principally in the traditional goal of using animal models to understand human cancer. The historical importance of retroviruses in the discovery of cancer genes is now widely appreciated, but many of the recent spectacular revelations about the molecular basis of cancer have occurred in other venues—such as human genetics, cell signaling, and developmental biology—rather than virology. Instead, the central goals of retrovirology today are the treatment and the prevention of AIDS and the use of retroviruses as gene delivery devices. These goals have only intensified the need to further dissect viral particles and genomes, understand their modes of replication, and describe host responses to infection. Such efforts have focused on structural properties of viral proteins and their assembly; host receptors for retroviruses and their interactions with envelope proteins; the mechanism of proviral integration; the regulation of viral gene expression; and various aspects of pathogenesis and the immune response to retroviral infection.

Not surprisingly, recent efforts to examine these issues have focused largely on the HIVs and the retroviruses most commonly used to create vectors, the murine leukemia viruses (MLVs). It is our contention, and an assumption on which this book is built, that a full understanding of any single retrovirus depends on an appreciation of the common properties of retroviruses as a class, as well as the unique features of each type.