The nef gene products of both simian and human immunodeficiency viruses enhance virus infectivity and are functionally interchangeable.

Adult rhesus macaques infected with nef-defective simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) exhibit extremely low levels of steady-state virus replication, do not succumb to immunodeficiency disease, and are protected from experimental challenge with pathogenic isolates of SIV. Similarly, rare humans found to be infected with nef-defective human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) variants display exceptionally low viral burdens and do not show evidence of disease progression after many years of infection. HIV-1 Nef induces the rapid endocytosis and lysosomal degradation of cell surface CD4 and enhances virus infectivity in primary human T cells and macrophages. Although expression of SIV Nef also leads to down-modulation of cell surface CD4 levels, no evidence for SIV Nef-induced enhancement of virus infectivity was observed in earlier studies. Thus, it remains unclear whether fundamental differences exist between the activities of HIV-1 and SIV Nef. To establish more clearly whether the SIV and HIV-1 nef gene products are functionally analogous, we compared the replication kinetics and infectivity of variants of SIVmac239 that either do (SIVnef+) or do not (SIV delta nef) encode intact nef gene products. SIVnef+ replicates more rapidly than nef-defective viruses in both human and rhesus peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs). As previously described for HIV-1 Nef, SIV Nef also enhances virus infectivity within each cycle of virus replication. As a strategy for evaluating the in vivo contribution of HIV-1 nef alleles and long terminal repeat regulatory sequences to the pathogenesis of immunodeficiency disease, we constructed SIV-HIV chimeras in which the nef coding and U3 regulatory regions of SIVmac239 were replaced by the corresponding regions from HIV-1/R73 (SIVR7nef+). SIVR7nef+ displays enhanced infectivity and accelerated replication kinetics in primary human and rhesus PBMC infections compared to its nef-defective counterpart. Converse chimeras, containing SIV Nef in an HIV-1 background (R7SIVnef+) also exhibit greater infectivity than matched nef-defective viruses (R7SIV delta nef). These data indicate that SIV Nef, like that of HIV-1, does enhance virus replication in primary cells in tissue culture and that HIV-1 and SIV Nef are functionally interchangeable in the context of both HIV-1 and SIV.