Selection of potent non-toxic inhibitory sequences from a randomized HIV-1 specific lentiviral short hairpin RNA library.

• Main Authors: Carola Pongratz, Benjamin Yazdanpanah, Hamid Kashkar, Maik J Lehmann, Hans-Georg Kräusslich, Martin Krönke
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2010-10-01
• Series: PLoS ONE
• Online Access: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmid/20949027/?tool=EBI

RNA interference (RNAi) has been considered as an efficient therapeutic approach against the human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1). However, to establish a durable inhibition of HIV-1, multiple effective short hairpin RNAs (shRNAs) need to be stably expressed to prevent the emergence of viral escape variants. In this study, we engineered a randomized lentiviral H1-promoter driven shRNA-library against the viral genome. Potent HIV-1 specific shRNAs were selected by ganciclovir treatment of cell lines stably expressing the cDNA of Herpes Simplex Virus thymidine kinase (HSV-TK) fused to HIV-1 nucleotide sequences. More than 50% of 200 selected shRNAs inhibited an HIV-1 based luciferase reporter assay by more than 70%. Stable expression of some of those shRNAs in an HIV-1 permissive HeLa cell line inhibited infection of wild-type HIV-1 by more than 90%. The combination of a randomized shRNA-library directed against HIV-1 with a live cell selection procedure yielded non-toxic and highly efficient HIV-1 specific inhibitory sequences that could serve as valuable candidates for gene therapy studies.