Hiring in life sciences? Share your open positions with our professional community. Read more Close

Advertisement

Generation and evaluation of an EcoHIV mouse model to study HIV-1 integration and expression.

Created on 20 Jun 2026

Authors

Wanrong Wei, Ying Zhou, Yan Ma, Zihao Yang, Xuejiao Xia, Yige Ma, Yang Gao, Changjun Wang, Jiarui Liu, Yue Liu, Lei Yu, Siyao Ren, Jiezhen Li, Chaojiang Gu

Published in

Virology. Volume 623. Pages 110991. Jun 04, 2026. Epub Jun 04, 2026.

Abstract

Antiretroviral therapy suppresses HIV replication but does not purge the latent reservoirs, which remains a major barrier to cure. There is an urgent need to establish a reservoir in a mouse model for investigation of viral replication and clearance. We established an EcoHIV infection model in conventional mice by replacing HIV-1 gp120 protein with an ecotropic murine leukemia virus envelope to enable entry via the murine mCAT-1 receptor. EcoHIV can infect immunocompetent mice and multiple mutant mouse strains and replicate in CD4+ T cells, macrophages, and immune cells in the brain. We created and systematically validated a nested qPCR for quantitation of HIV-1/EcoHIV integration events, and we found that viral genomic integration was significantly suppressed by HIV-1 integrase inhibitors such as Raltegravir. The immunofluorescence staining indicated EcoHIV can be efficiently transmitted from infected CD4 + T cells to macrophages in vitro and EcoHIV expression was effectively inhibited by Abacavir and Raltegravir. Importantly, BLI data demonstrate that EcoHIV establishes latent reservoirs -like state in mice which can be reactivated by LRA treatment. Altogether, our model provides a valuable platform for the controlled study of HIV entry, integration, transmission, latency within tissue-resident compartments under ART and for the preclinical evaluation of latency-reversing and curative strategies.

PMID:
42320113
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 20 Jun 2026.

Read full publication at:
Please sign in to see all details.

Advertisement

Stats

  • Community rating n/a 0 votes
  • Reviewers' rating n/a 0 votes
  • Your rating

1-terrible, 9-excellent. How would you rate this publication? Sign in in to submit your rating.

  • Recommendations n/a n/a positive of 0 vote(s)
  • Views 1
  • Comments 0

Recommended by

  • No recommendations yet.

Post a comment

You need to be signed in to post comments. You can sign in here.

Comments

There are no comments yet.

Advertisement