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Structure–function relationships of HIV-1 envelope sequence-variable regions refocus vaccine design

Nature Reviews Immunology volume 10, pages 527–535 (2010)Cite this article

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Abstract

One of the main challenges of developing an HIV-1 vaccine lies in eliciting immune responses that can overcome the antigenic variability exhibited by HIV. Most HIV-1 vaccine development has focused on inducing immunity to conserved regions of the HIV-1 envelope. However, new studies of the sequence-variable regions of the HIV-1 gp120 envelope glycoprotein have shown that there are conserved immunological and structural features in these regions. Recombinant immunogens that include these features may provide the means to address the antigenic diversity of HIV-1 and induce protective antibodies that can prevent infection with HIV-1.

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Figure 1: Ribbon diagram of the crystallographic structure of the gp120 monomer as bound to CD4.
Figure 2: Conserved and variable residues in the V1, V2 and V3 loops of gp120.
Figure 3: Histograms showing the length distributions of the V1 and V2 loops of gp120 from recorded HIV-1 sequences in the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) database.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to D. Almond and J. Swetnam for assistance in preparing the figures and to C. Hioe, M. Totrov and X.-P. Kong for contributing ideas to and helping to shape this article, which includes studies supported by grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the US National Institutes of Health (grants HL59725, AI38065, DP2 OD004631 and AI084119) and the US Department of Veterans Affairs.

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  1. and the Department of Pathology, Susan Zolla-Pazner is at the Veterans Affairs New York Harbor Healthcare System, Manhattan Campus, New York 10010, USA, New York University School of Medicine, New York 10016, USA.,

    Susan Zolla-Pazner

  2. Timothy Cardozo is at the Department of Pharmacology, New York University School of Medicine, New York 10016, USA.,

    Timothy Cardozo

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Zolla-Pazner, S., Cardozo, T. Structure–function relationships of HIV-1 envelope sequence-variable regions refocus vaccine design. Nat Rev Immunol 10, 527–535 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nri2801

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