Changes of biological properties and pathogenesis of CAEV chimeras expressing Nef and Vpx/Vpr accessory proteins in infected goats

Background Caprine Arthritis Encephalitis Virus (CAEV) is a goat lentivirus closely related to HIV that is naturally attenuated with only a minor proportion of infected goats that develop inflammatory diseases, in absence of progression in AIDS. In contrast, to HIV CAEV does not infect productively the CD4+ T cells and has a simpler genome organization. Indeed, CAEV lacks 3 out of 6 regulatory/accessory genes found in HIV. We thought that CAEV/goat is an excellent model to study the functions and the implication of primate lentiviral accessory proteins in the biology and the pathogenesis of lentiviruses.