UMMS Affiliation
Program in Molecular Medicine
Publication Date
2017-03-06
Document Type
Article
Disciplines
Immunology of Infectious Disease | Virology | Virus Diseases
Abstract
A hallmark of HIV-1 infection is the continuously declining number of the virus' predominant target cells, activated CD4+ T cells. With diminishing CD4+ T cell levels, the capacity to utilize alternate cell types and receptors, including cells that express low CD4 receptor levels such as macrophages, thus becomes crucial. To explore evolutionary paths that allow HIV-1 to acquire a wider host cell range by infecting cells with lower CD4 levels, we dissected the evolution of the envelope-CD4 interaction under in vitro culture conditions that mimicked the decline of CD4high target cells, using a prototypic subtype B, R5-tropic strain. Adaptation to CD4low targets proved to severely alter envelope functions including trimer opening as indicated by a higher affinity to CD4 and loss in shielding against neutralizing antibodies. We observed a strikingly decreased infectivity on CD4high target cells, but sustained infectivity on CD4low targets, including macrophages. Intriguingly, the adaptation to CD4low targets altered the kinetic of the entry process, leading to rapid CD4 engagement and an extended transition time between CD4 and CCR5 binding during entry. This phenotype was also observed for certain central nervous system (CNS) derived macrophage-tropic viruses, highlighting that the functional perturbation we defined upon in vitro adaptation to CD4low targets occurs in vivo. Collectively, our findings suggest that CD4low adapted envelopes may exhibit severe deficiencies in entry fitness and shielding early in their evolution. Considering this, adaptation to CD4low targets may preferentially occur in a sheltered and immune-privileged environment such as the CNS to allow fitness restoring compensatory mutations to occur.
Rights and Permissions
Copyright © 2017 Beauparlant et al
DOI of Published Version
10.1371/journal.ppat.1006255
Source
PLoS Pathog. 2017 Mar 6;13(3):e1006255. doi: 10.1371/journal.ppat.1006255. eCollection 2017 Mar. Link to article on publisher's site
Journal/Book/Conference Title
PLoS pathogens
Related Resources
PubMed ID
28264054
Repository Citation
Beauparlant D, Rusert P, Magnus C, Kadelka C, Weber J, Uhr T, Zagordi O, Oberle C, Duenas-Decamp MJ, Clapham PR, Metzner KJ, Gunthard HF, Trkola A. (2017). Delineating CD4 dependency of HIV-1: Adaptation to infect low level CD4 expressing target cells widens cellular tropism but severely impacts on envelope functionality. Open Access Articles. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.ppat.1006255. Retrieved from https://escholarship.umassmed.edu/oapubs/3121
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.