How cells are infected by HIV

n international team of scientists using high-brightness x-rays from the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science's Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory has determined the high-resolution atomic structure of a cell-surface receptor that most strains of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) use to gain entry to human immune cells. “These structural details should help us understand more precisely how HIV infects cells, and how we can do better at blocking that process with next-generation drugs”, said Beili Wu, professor at the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica (SIMM), Chinese Academy of Sciences. Wu was the senior investigator for the study, which was published in Science Express. “International collaborations like this one are increasingly needed to solve big problems in science”, said study co-author Raymond C. Stevens, a professor at The Scripps Research Institute in California. “Now that we have both human CXCR4 and CCR5 HIV co-receptor three-dimensional structures, it is likely we will see the next generation of HIV therapeutics”. “Knowing the CXCR4 structure and now the CCR5 structure at this level of detail should accelerate the development of drugs that can block HIV by using both of these co-receptors”, said Wu.