Lentiviral vectors are promising gene delivery tools capable of transducing a variety of dividing and non-dividing cells, including pluripotent stem cells which are refractory for transduction by murine retroviruses. Although there is a growing debate on the safety of lentiviral vectors for gene transfer, in particular for those derived from human immunodeficiency viruses, type one (HIV-1) and ...

Ebola virus is a highly lethal pathogen responsible for several outbreaks of hemorrhagic fever. Here we show that the primate lentiviral binding C-type lectins DC-SIGN and L-SIGN act as cofactors for cellular entry by Ebola virus. Furthermore, DC-SIGN on the surface of dendritic cells is able to function as a trans receptor, binding Ebola virus-pseudotyped lentiviral particles and transmitting ...

Standard integration-proficient lentiviral vectors (IPLVs) are effective at much lower doses than other vector systems and have shown promise in several gene therapy approaches. Their main drawback is the potential risk of insertional mutagenesis. Novel biosafety-enhanced integration-deficient lentiviral vectors (IDLVs) offer a significant improvement and comparable transduction efficacy to the...

Cover Illustration: Human glial chimeric mouse cortex engrafted with fetal human progenitor cells (human NG2, red), visualized 1 year after neonatal transplant. A fraction of the donor were tagged before transplant a lentiviral vector expressing membranebound EGFP (green), thereby visualizing in adulthood morphological complexity, domain structure and tiling cortical hGPCs vivo. (See Osorio, MJ...

Mammalian cells express several factors that inhibit lentiviral infection and that have been under strong selective pressure. One of these factors, TRIM5, targets the capsid protein of incoming retrovirus particles and inhibits subsequent steps of the replication cycle. By substituting human immunodeficiency virus type 1 capsid, we were able to show that a set of divergent primate lentivirus ca...