Human immunodeficiency virus type 1 coreceptors participate in postentry stages in the virus replication cycle and function in simian immunodeficiency virus infection.

Primate lentiviruses use chemokine coreceptors in addition to the CD4 receptor to initiate virus infection. Simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) productively infects human cells expressing CD4 and the human allele of the chemokine coreceptor CCR-5 as efficiently as it infects macaque cells expressing human CD4, suggesting that SIV can function with either a simian or a human coreceptor in conjunction with human CD4. In the same macaque cells expressing human CD4, the replication of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) is blocked at several stages of infection; some isolates are restricted prior to reverse transcription, while others, including some macrophage-tropic and primary isolates, are restricted at a step after reverse transcription but prior to migration of the preintegration complex to the nucleus. Both blocks in HIV-1 replication can be relieved by either expression of the appropriate human coreceptor (CCR-5 or CXCR-4) or expression of SIV gene products in cis with the HIV-1 envelope as a chimera between SIV and HIV-1 (SHIV). Thus, a virus with a SIV core and HIV-1 envelope can efficiently infect macaque cells expressing human CD4, presumably by interacting with the simian coreceptor, whereas a virus with an HIV-1 core and an HIV-1 envelope requires expression of the human allele of the coreceptor for productive infection of these cells. These studies suggest that there are interactions among the coreceptor, the viral envelope, and another viral gene product that govern postentry steps of virus replication. These data are consistent with the hypothesis that such interactions may be required for translocation of the virus core to the nucleus. Moreover, the differential abilities of SIV and HIV-1 to function in these processes with heterologous primate coreceptors may have implications for cross-species transmission.