Figure 2.

Lentiviral vector delivery and expression of shRNAs targeting HIV-1. Lentiviral vectors can stably transduce target cells (1) integrate and constitutively express anti-HIV-1 siRNAs or shRNAs (shRNAs are shown) (2). The anti-HIV-1 shRNAs are exported via the Exportin 5 pathway subsequently delivering the shRNA to Dicer (3) where the loop is removed by Dicer processing and the correctly processed shRNA, specifically the antisense strand loaded into RISC, where the HIV-1 mRNA is targeted and degraded (4). The lentiviral vector transduced cells can be used to either protect a cell from viral infection (A–C, depicts viral entry-integration while (D) depicts viral mRNA production from the provirus) or therapeutically to reduce overall viral burden on a cell that has already been infected.