We invite you to attend the second annual meeting of the Pittsburgh Center for HIV Protein Interactions (PCHPI). The focus of this year's meeting will be early events in retroviral cellular infection, including retroviral restriction and HIV nuclear entry. The meeting will be held on May 13, 2009.

TThe PCHPI is one of three centers launched by NIGMS and NIAID to deepen our biological understanding of HIV. These centers are led by Alan Frankel (UCSF), Angela Gronenborn (University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine) and Wesley Sundquist (University of Utah). The centers integrate a variety of techniques from structural biology and biochemistry to capture in unprecedented detail the three-dimensional structures of HIV proteins bound to human cellular components, such as proteins or DNA. The structural information will help elucidate how the different components interact and reveal new approaches for disrupting those interactions, potentially leading to new targets for HIV therapies or vaccines.

The University of Pittsburgh Center for HIV Protein Interactions (PCHPI) specializes in imaging and determining the structures of HIV proteins and their host cell interaction partners and, more specifically, in HIV-host interactions that occur immediately after the virus fuses with the host cell and before integration of the viral genome into that of the host cell. The center has developed a framework for computationally predicting cellular partners for HIV and for experimentally validating such predictions.

New methodologies and tools developed by the centers will be available to the research community at large. The centers also will collaborate with other scientists engaged in structural and functional studies of HIV, including researchers funded by NIAID through a coordinated funding program.