AIDSWEEKLY Plus, Monday, 21 April 1997
Daniel J. DeNoon, Senior Editor
A UK/US research team has shown that the ability of cell- culture-adapted feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV) to infect and fuse with human cells is based on its use of the CXCR4 coreceptor.
"We believe that this is the first evidence of shared chemokine receptor use between primate and non-primate lentiviruses," wrote University of Glasgow researchers Brian J. Willett and colleagues in a letter to the journal Nature ("Common Mechanism of Infection by Lentiviruses," Nature, 1997;385:587).
T-cell-tropic strains of HIV-1 require the CXCR4 coreceptor to enter cells. The link between the two distantly related lentiviruses suggests that the ability to use chemokine receptors for cell entry is a basic, and perhaps necessary, feature of HIV disease.
"It seems that the chemokine receptor may be a common link between FIV and the primate lentiviruses and a key determinant of the pathogenesis of AIDS," Willett et al. concluded.
The corresponding author for this study is Brian J. Willett, Department of Veterinary Pathology, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G61 1QH, United Kingdom. Email: bwillett@vet.gla.ac.uk.
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