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©The Author(s) 2015. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Biol Chem. Aug 26, 2015; 6(3): 83-94
Published online Aug 26, 2015. doi: 10.4331/wjbc.v6.i3.83
Published online Aug 26, 2015. doi: 10.4331/wjbc.v6.i3.83
Multifunctional facets of retrovirus integrase
Duane P Grandgenett, Krishan K Pandey, Sibes Bera, Institute for Molecular Virology, Saint Louis University Health Sciences Center, St. Louis, MO 63104, United States
Hideki Aihara, Department of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, and Biophysics, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, United States
Author contributions: Grandgenett DP conceived this review; Pandey KK, Bera S and Aihara H co-wrote the review.
Supported by Partially National Institutes of Health grants from NIAID (AI100682 to Grandgenett DP) and NIGMS (GM109770 to Aihara H).
Conflict-of-interest statement: Authors declare no conflict of interests for this article.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Duane P Grandgenett, Professor of Molecular Virology, Institute for Molecular Virology, Saint Louis University Health Sciences Center, 1100 S. Grand Blvd., St. Louis, MO 63104, United States. grandgdp@slu.edu
Telephone: +1-314-9778784
Received: May 12, 2015
Peer-review started: May 13, 2015
First decision: June 24, 2015
Revised: July 1, 2015
Accepted: July 24, 2015
Article in press: July 27, 2015
Published online: August 26, 2015
Peer-review started: May 13, 2015
First decision: June 24, 2015
Revised: July 1, 2015
Accepted: July 24, 2015
Article in press: July 27, 2015
Published online: August 26, 2015
Core Tip
Core tip: This review examines the multifunctional properties of retrovirus integrase (IN) besides its key function of integrating the viral DNA into host chromosomes. IN has a major role in the maturation of the virus, reverse transcription and nuclear transport of the preintegration complex. IN binds to cellular cofactors for uncoating of the core and to other cellular proteins that guide the preintegration complex to preferred regions on the host genome for integration. Understanding these IN functions has resulted in the production of clinical IN strand transfer inhibitors to prevent human immunodeficiency virus (HIV/AIDS) and development of retrovirus vectors for human gene therapy.