Figure 1.

The life cycle of HIV-1.The early stage begins with virus interaction with the host cell receptors (1), which causes the virus to fuse and release its viral core into the host cell’s cytoplasm (2). Following this, the core is transported across the cytoplasm (3) as reverse transcription and nuclear import start to occur (4). The viral components are brought into the nucleus at the nuclear pore, where they are localized to transcriptionally active chromatin while uncoating and reverse transcription are carried out (5). Integration follows (6); then, viral genes are transcribed (7) and translated (8) into the Gag polyproteins, which assemble (9) and localize to the host membrane, followed by the occurrence of the budding of an immature virion (10). The viral protease cleaves the Gag polyprotein into its component, functional proteins during the last stage of the HIV-1 lifecycle, known as maturation (11).