Construction of plasmid for HIV-1 gag–pol RNA transcription. (A) An amplified hepatitis C virus (HCV) 5′-UTR fragment (nt 19–339, the accession number of the reference sequence is AB049088) is ligated into the TA cloning site of pGEM-T Easy vector. (B) The amplified HIV gag–pol fragment (nt 1,480–4,315, reference strain is HXB2, K03455) is ligated into pGEM-HCV, followed by HIV gag–pol RNA transcription by T7 RNA polymerase.