Figure 3

Restoration of HIV-1 virion production upon transient Gag, Gag-Pro, and Gag-Pro-Pol expression. (A) Open reading frames and signals contained within HPdBs. A representation of the HPdBs mRNA (grey box) is shown with the respective viral splice sites and splicing signals indicated. (B) Reverse transcriptase activity of cell-free supernatants from 293T cells transfected with the indicated plasmids, with or without the co-expression of the vector HPdBs. Black bars indicate the reverse transcriptase activity measured upon transient transfection of either HPNd, HPBs, or the indicated pNL4-3 derivative alone. Grey bars indicate the reverse transcriptase activity measured upon transient transfection of the indicated NL4-3 derivative along with HPBs. Reverse transcriptase activity represents the average of three independent experiments, normalized to the reverse transcriptase activity of supernatants from pNL4-3 transfected cells. Single asterisk indicates there is no significant difference when compared to NL4-3 transfected cells (p > 0.02 by Student's t-test) and double asterisk indicates there is no significant difference when compared to mock transfected cells (p > 0.2), from three independent experiments. (C) Protein from transfected 293T cells was subjected to Western blot analysis using serum from an HIV-1 infected patient. The HIV-1 Gag precursor (p55 Gag) and Gag proteolytic products (CA and MA) are indicated on the right.