Designing a non-virulent HIV-l strain: potential implications for vaccine and experimental research

Background: culturing and working with wild type hiv virions may produce contamination and infection. the mainobjective of this study was to design a non-infective hiv-i strain that can be used safely in research laboratories forvarious research topics on hiv life cycle and pathogenesis.methods: non-infective hiv-i strain (mznl4-3) was designed by deleting a 2 kb sequence ofhiv-1 (nl4-3 strain)genome that codes reverse transcriptase (rt) and integrase (in) enzymes.results: the deletion removed 95% of rt and 34% of in peptide sequences and abolished the functions of these enzymestotally. this deletion didn't produce any other alteration in hiv genome, not only in mrna level but also intranscription or translation levels. we named this strain, mutated z nl4-3 (mznl4-3).conclusions: our mutated hiv-l virions can be produced by transforming any mammalian cell line with mznl4-3vector (pmznl4-3) but these virions can not replicate in any competent target cell. hence, it can be used for many ofthe hiv-i researches in a level 2 lab. mznl4-3 has also the major antigen markers of hiv-i, ny5 and lav strains,which are the most common strains of hiv-1. therefore, mznl4-3 can also be considered as a choice for hiv-1 vaccineinvestigation. probably mznl4-3 could be used for lab research and vaccine investigation.