Abstract
This review highlights the significant observations of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) assembly, release and maturation made possible with advanced light microscopy techniques. The advances in technology which now enables these light microscopy measurements are discussed with special emphasis on live imaging approaches including Total Internal Reflection Fluorescence (TIRF), high-resolution light microscopy techniques including PALM and STORM and single molecule measurements, including Fluorescence Resonance Energy Transfer (FRET). The review concludes with a discussion on what new insights and understanding can be expected from these measurements.
Highlights
Assembly, release and maturation made possible with advanced light microscopy techniques
This review is primarily focused on the advanced imaging methods for study of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and the above questions are too fundamental to be addressed here, given the depth of HIV literature, at the end of the review, a discussion as to how advanced microscopy can be helpful in developing a more complete understanding of complex biological dynamics will be presented
We will here focus on the advanced imaging techniques which have been utilized to observe the dynamics by which these molecules come together to form the immature HIV virions and lead to its maturation
Summary
Study of HIV and Its Interactions with the Host. Viruses 2021, 13, 223. In the writer’s opinion, the most fundamental challenge is the failure of human brain to understand dynamics of any system with more than three simultaneously interacting parts, which covers almost all Biological processes. This frustration is not new, I would argue it is the fundamental challenge which drove Ramón Cajal to urge his acolytes to focus primarily on reproducibility as the fundamental goal of their scientific endeavor while avoiding creating theories [4]. We will here focus on the advanced imaging techniques which have been utilized to observe the dynamics by which these molecules come together to form the immature HIV virions and lead to its maturation. The evanescent filed generated in TIRF mode can be well calibrated and used as a tool to measure the distance molecules travel away/towards the glass/media interface, this aspect of the TIRF microscopy was significantly developed during study of endocytosis [25,26] and applied to study the assembly of HIV demonstrating the coupling of curvature creation and Gag polymerization during HIV assembly [27]
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