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Nature Medicine 9, 1262 - 1263 (2003)
doi:10.1038/nm1003-1262

HIV's great escape

Mark Marsh1 & Markus Thali1

  1. Mark Marsh is at the MRC Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology and Dept of Biochemistry, University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT, UK, and Markus Thali is at the University of Vermont, Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, 318 Stafford Hall, 95 Carrigan Drive, Burlington, Vermont 05405-0084, USA. e-mail: m.marsh@ucl.ac.uk or e-mail: markus.thali@uvm.edu


Viruses need cellular proteins to help them escape from cells. New results show that HIV and other viruses use the cellular machinery that normally delivers proteins to late endosomes and lysosomes.


For membrane-containing viruses such as HIV, assembly requires that the viral structural proteins self-associate in the context of the host cell's membrane. In doing so, the viruses acquire a membrane through a budding process (Fig. 1

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